Budget Calculator

How to use this budget calculator

1. Enter your monthly take-home income, the amount that reaches your bank account after taxes and payroll deductions.
2. Fill in the main lines: rent or mortgage, groceries, dining out and savings. Every amount starts as an example for a made-up household, so replace each one with your own number.
3. Open “More lines” to add utilities, transportation, health care, insurance, minimum debt payments, entertainment, subscriptions, retirement and extra debt payments. Leave a line blank if it does not apply.
4. Read the results: what is left over, your savings rate, how your needs, wants and savings compare with 50/30/20, and how your spending mix compares with the average U.S. household. Copy the link to save or share the scenario.

How the budget is calculated

The calculator adds your lines into three groups, the same buckets the 50/30/20 rule uses: needs, wants and savings and extra debt payments. Total expenses are needs plus wants. Money left over is whatever remains of your income after expenses and savings, which means it is money you have not assigned to anything yet.

Each group’s share of income is its total divided by I, and the savings rate is S ÷ I. The 50/30/20 guideline for your income is 0.50 × I for needs, 0.30 × I for wants and 0.20 × I for savings.

Worked example

Take-home pay of I = $5,000, needs of N = $2,950, wants of W = $860 and savings of S = $750. Left over = $5,000 − ($2,950 + $860 + $750) = $440. Needs are 59% of income, wants 17% and savings 15%, so the savings rate is 15%. On $5,000, the 50/30/20 guideline is $2,500, $1,500 and $1,000, which puts needs $450 over the guideline, wants $640 under and savings $250 under. These are example numbers for a made-up household, not averages.

The 50/30/20 rule, explained

The 50/30/20 rule divides take-home pay three ways: 50% for needs, 30% for wants and 20% for savings and debt payments. This calculator treats the 50% and 30% as ceilings and the 20% as a floor when it compares your budget. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s teaching materials describe the rule as “one rule to live by” when budgeting, and note that it is only one rule and not everyone can follow it. The CFPB’s own worksheet applies it to take-home pay.

The rule is usually traced to Elizabeth Warren (now a U.S. senator) and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi and their 2005 book All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, which sorts money into Must-Haves, Wants and Savings. Treat the percentages as a rule of thumb for getting started rather than a standard your budget must meet. Here is what the split looks like at several take-home incomes:

The rule fits some households better than others. Where rent is high or income is modest, needs can take more than half of take-home pay before anything else is paid. In that case, one option is to start with a smaller, steady savings amount and revisit the split as income or costs change.

What counts as a need and what counts as a want?

The CFPB describes needs as the basic things people must have to survive, such as food, clothing and shelter; resources they need to do their jobs, such as reliable transportation; and resources that protect their money and property, such as emergency savings and insurance. Wants are upgrades and other things that would be nice to have but are not necessary for living, income or protecting what you have. Some judgment calls:

• Groceries vs. dining out. Groceries are a need. Restaurants and takeout are a want, even though the food is the same.
• Phone and internet. The CFPB’s teaching guide lists a cell phone among its examples of wants, yet many people need a phone and internet for work or school. This calculator puts them in utilities, a need; move them if you see it differently.
• Minimum debt payments. The Warren and Tyagi book describes Must-Haves as the bills you have to pay every month, and required minimums fit that description, so the calculator counts them as needs. The CFPB’s worksheet instead groups credit card payments with savings and debts. If you prefer that approach, enter your minimums on the “Extra debt payments” line. Payments above the minimum count as savings and debt payoff here.
• Child care. The CFPB’s worksheet lists child care among needs. Use the “Insurance & other needs” line for it.

How to make a budget

The CFPB’s budgeting guide breaks the job into four steps, which work with any budgeting method:

1. Where does my money come from? List every source of income, not only your paycheck. Use the amount that reaches you after taxes.
2. Where does it go? Log your spending by category. The CFPB’s worksheet suggests keeping track of everything you spend for a month to see where the money is really going, since memory misses small and irregular costs.
3. What are my bills, and when are they due? Put fixed bills and due dates in one place so nothing lands unexpectedly.
4. Create a working budget. Enter your numbers above, compare them with the guideline and the national mix, and adjust. Review it every month, because prices, pay and goals change.

Zero-based budgeting

In a zero-based budget, income minus planned spending and saving equals zero: every dollar has a job. That does not mean spending everything. Savings, an emergency fund and extra debt payments are jobs too. The “left over” figure in this calculator is the amount not yet assigned. If it is positive, you can decide where it goes; if it is negative, your plan asks for more than you earn, and something has to give. The example budget above has $440 unassigned.

How much does the average U.S. household spend?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Surveys (released December 19, 2025, covering 2024) put average annual spending at $78,535 per “consumer unit”, about $6,545 a month. A consumer unit is a family, a person living alone or sharing a household but financially independent, or two or more people who share major expenses (see the BLS glossary). Average income before taxes was $104,207. BLS did not publish average income after taxes for 2024, because the tax model it relies on was not updated for that year; the latest published figure is $87,869 for 2023.

Source: BLS, average annual expenditures of all consumer units, 2021–2024. Shares are each category divided by the $78,535 total and match the shares BLS publishes.

Keep four things in mind before comparing yourself with these averages:

• An average blends very different households. The survey covers about 136 million consumer units with 2.4 people and 1.3 earners on average. 65% are homeowners (37% with a mortgage and 28% without) and 35% are renters, so “average housing” describes no particular household.
• Housing leaves out mortgage principal. The survey counts mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance, rent, utilities and household goods, but reports mortgage principal ($2,924 a year on average across all consumer units) separately. If you own with a mortgage, your monthly payment will look bigger in this calculator than in the survey’s housing figure.
• It measures spending, not saving. The 12.5% “personal insurance and pensions” category is mostly employee retirement and Social Security contributions ($9,222 of $9,797). Employee contributions like these usually come out of a paycheck before take-home pay.
• Averages are not targets. They describe what households spent, not what any household should spend.

How this calculator compares your spending with the average

To compare like with like, the calculator leaves out the retirement and Social Security contributions, then compares category shares of the rest of the average household’s spending. It maps your lines to the survey’s categories this way: rent or mortgage and utilities to housing; groceries and dining out to food; transportation to transportation; health care to health care; entertainment and subscriptions to entertainment (which in the survey includes pets and hobbies); and “Insurance & other needs” plus “Shopping & other” to everything else (apparel, personal care, education, alcohol, tobacco, reading, miscellaneous items, cash contributions and life insurance). Minimum debt payments and savings are not compared, because the survey does not measure them in the same way.

Spending by income group

Spending patterns shift a lot with income. Housing takes 41.6% of spending for the lowest fifth of consumer units by income and 29.3% for the highest fifth.

Source: BLS Table 1101, quintiles of income before taxes, 2024. Shares here are each category divided by that group’s average total spending.

How much should I spend on housing?

A widely used rule of thumb is to keep housing at or below 30% of income. It matches the line HUD uses to flag housing strain: according to HUD, as reported by the Census Bureau, households are considered cost-burdened when they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, mortgage payments and other housing costs, and severely cost-burdened above 50%. That is a yardstick for measuring affordability, not a personal limit. It is also a share of income, while this calculator measures against your take-home pay, so treat the comparison as approximate. On $5,000 of take-home pay, 30% is $1,500.

For context, housing and utilities make up 37.9% of the average household’s comparison spending above (and housing alone is 33.4% of total spending), but that average includes owners with no mortgage. If you are deciding what to buy or rent, the house affordability calculator works from your income and debts, and the mortgage calculator shows the full monthly payment.

How to budget on a low income

When money is tight, the percentages matter less than the order of decisions. Some approaches people use:

• Start with what must be paid. Rent, utilities, food, transportation to work and required debt payments come first. If needs alone are more than half of your take-home pay, that happens, and it is not a failure; the CFPB itself notes the 50/30/20 rule is not one everyone can follow.
• Save a small, automatic amount. The CFPB says saving automatically is one of the easiest ways to make savings consistent, and that even a small amount can provide some financial security.
• Use the shortfall message. If the calculator shows a gap, look first at the largest wants, then at whether any need has a cheaper alternative, then at income.
• Check the income side. The paycheck calculator and salary calculator show what a different wage or job would mean for take-home pay.

How to budget with irregular income

If your pay changes from month to month, base the plan on a lower-income month so that a slow month does not break it. Cover needs first, then a small buffer, then savings and wants. When a month comes in higher than the plan, decide where the extra goes before it is spent. If you work for yourself, take taxes out first: enter income after taxes in this calculator, and estimate them with the income tax calculator. The CFPB’s Your Money, Your Goals toolkit includes a cash flow budget tool built around when money comes in and goes out.

Where does an emergency fund fit?

In the 50/30/20 rule, emergency savings belong in the 20% bucket. The CFPB’s emergency fund guide does not set one target for everyone; it says the right amount depends on your situation and suggests looking at the unexpected expenses you have actually had and what they cost. To see how a fund or other savings could grow, try the savings calculator. If debt payments are squeezing the plan, the credit card payoff calculator shows how extra payments change your payoff date.

What this calculator does not do

• It does not calculate taxes. Enter take-home pay; the paycheck calculator can estimate it.
• It plans one typical month. It does not model irregular bills, annual costs, inflation or changing income.
• Its national comparison uses averages across all households, and the mapping of your lines to survey categories is approximate.
• It gives general guidelines, not personal financial advice. Your goals, obligations and local costs decide what is right for you.
• It runs in your browser, and the amounts you enter are not sent to our servers. If you copy the link to your results, the link contains the amounts you entered, so share it only with people you trust.