What Do Kids Really Cost, and How Do I Plan When It Keeps Changing?

Why it feels like you’re always behind

Most families plan for kids the way they plan for a house: estimate the price, save toward it. But raising kids isn’t one purchase. It’s eighteen years of costs that change shape every few years, while your income, your job and sometimes your family change too.

So the feeling of “we saved, and it still isn’t enough” is normal. It doesn’t mean you planned badly. It means the target moved.

What the numbers say

The most widely quoted estimate comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s last full report: about $233,610 for a middle-income married couple to raise a child born in 2015 through age 17. That figure assumed about 2% inflation a year.

Inflation ran higher. When the Brookings Institution updated the estimate in 2022, the same child came to about $310,605, roughly $18,000 a year, and that’s before college.

Child care alone shows how fast the pieces move. Child Care Aware of America put the national average price of child care at $13,128 for 2024: about 10% of a married couple’s median income, and about a third of a single parent’s.

Treat these as a sense of scale, not your budget. Where you live and the choices you make move the number a lot.

Plan in stages, not one big number

One lifetime total is too big to act on. Three stages are easier, because each has its own biggest costs:

• The early years (birth to about 5). Child care is usually the largest line, often bigger than the mortgage. Life and disability insurance belong here too: this is when your family depends most on your paycheck. Life and Disability Insurance in Your 30s and 40s covers both.
• The school years (about 6 to 12). Child care shrinks, but food, activities, sports, camps, braces and school costs grow. These are the years of many smaller bills that arrive at odd times. Kids Keep Showing Up With Bills covers where that money should sit.
• The teen years (about 13 to 18). Car insurance, a car, phones, trips, and the run-up to college. If college is a goal, this is when the savings plan meets the real price.

For each stage, ask: what’s coming in the next two to three years, and is the money for it already set aside?

Build in room for change

Things will change. A second child, a move, a job change, a child who needs extra support, a parent who needs help at the same time. You can’t predict which, but you can leave room:

• Keep the plan a little loose. Save toward the next stage, not every stage at once.
• Choose flexible accounts when the goal is uncertain. A 529 plan gives the best tax break for education; a Roth IRA gives more flexibility if plans change. 529 vs. Roth IRA walks through the tradeoff.
• Protect your own retirement first. Your kids can borrow for college; nobody lends you money to retire. Saving for yourself is also saving them from supporting you later.
• Review it once a year, and any time the family changes. A quick check each year beats a perfect plan made once.

If kids, aging parents, a career and your own retirement are all landing at once, Pulled in Every Direction Financially? helps you decide what to tackle first.

See it for your own family

Our free Squeeze Test shows what one amount can do across education, parent care and retirement at the same time. Then vs. Now shows how much the finish line has moved since your parents raised you.

Sources

• Brookings Institution, Isabel V. Sawhill and Morgan Welch, “The cost of raising a child has risen” (2022). The inflation-adjusted $310,605 estimate for a child born in 2015.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture, Expenditures on Children by Families, 2015 (published 2017). The $233,610 estimate.
• Child Care Aware of America, national child care price analysis for 2024.
• Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, or advice about your particular situation.