Compare your Monthly Spending by Age and Income [USA]

Rank your spending compared to other American households of similar ages to the head of household, family sizes, and annual pre-tax incomes to see how your spending habits compare. The calculator will calculate the percentile rank of your expenses against comparable households. Make sure that you include things like housing, transportation, utilities, health insurance, and entertainment, but don't include payroll taxes, income taxes or savings. For example, if you are 30 years old, earn $50,000, and single, you should compare your spending to households aged 25 to 35 with a family size of 1 and incomes from $40,000 to $60,000 to get a full comparison of other households at a similar stage in life. If you have multiple people in your family, typically you would use the age of the primary income earner.

Min Pre-Tax Income (Annual): $
Max Pre-Tax Income (Annual): $
Starting Comparison Age:
Ending Comparison Age:
Family Size:
Expenses (Monthly) : $

Spending Summary Statistics for Households Aged 18 to 100

Expenses Percentile Rank : Monthly expenses of $3,000 for ages 18 to 100 ranks at 38.88%
Median Spending : $3,591
Mean Spending : $5,366
Spending 25th - 75th Percentile Ranges : $2,358-$5,534
These results are based off of 20317 household samples with your matching parameters of households earning between $1 and $1,000,000 and between the ages of 18 to 100. The results especially for spending by category may look odd if there are less than 100 samples.

Scroll up to enter changes to your budget.

Monthly Spending Comparison by Percentile

Explanation of Monthly Spending Categories
Housing :
Mortages, Rent, Property Tax, Maintenance of Home.
Food :
Groceries, Restaurants, Fast Food, Alcohol.
Transportation :
Cars, Car Maintenance, Gas/Fuel, Car Insurance, Public Transit, Car Loans.
Health :
Healthcare, Health Insurance, Medical Services, Medical Supplies, Prescription Drugs.
Utilities :
Natural Gas, Electricity, Telephone, Water/Sewage.
Entertainment :
Fees and Admissions, Televisions, Other Entertainment Equipment and Services.
Other :
Other expenses.

Savings such as Social Security payments, cash savings, retirement and 401ks are not included. Income and Payroll taxes are also not included.

Expenses Visualizations

Middle 50% by Spending Ribbon

This is where your Spending would rank if there were 100 households within the nation who's head of households were between the ages of 18 to 100. 61 households would be have higher spending than you. 38 households would have lower spending than your household.

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The numbers are based off of the results of the 2021 Consumer Expenditure Survey (2021 Q2, Q3, Q4 and 2022 Q1) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you want to do your own analysis check out the raw data here: http://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm. The number of samples per age vary quite a bit, so you might get unusual results for certain combinations of ages, incomes, and family sizes. The numbers also will not fully match the CEX official documentations due to the way that I calculated the components of each expense amount for each expense percentile. The numbers for the 50th percentile actually are a blend of all the samples between the 45th percentile and 55th percentiles to smooth out individual differences in household spending.

3 thoughts on “Compare your Monthly Spending by Age and Income [USA]”

  1. I’ve just updated it with the latest available data. Glad you enjoy it! Costs sure have spiked up since the last time I updated it.

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