BiggerPockets Money · Budget Lab · 2024 CE Survey Data
Budget Calculator
See how your household spending stacks up against statistically similar American families, calibrated to your income quintile, household size, age, and local cost of living.
No location selected -- showing national averages
Data quality note
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Override price reference
Using prices from:
Or search for any metro:
Note on location accuracy: Housing uses HUD Fair Market Rents (40th percentile of local rental costs), which may be below median market rent in fast-appreciating areas. For non-metro areas, price adjustments (groceries, healthcare, transportation) use statewide averages -- BEA does not publish sub-metro price data. You can override this in the location panel above.
Note on data quality: Peer benchmarks use the 2024 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (released December 2025), anchored to published income-quintile means with dampened size and age adjustments. Housing is separately anchored to HUD Fair Market Rents for your selected location. The CPI adjustment below is a rough single-number estimate; individual categories inflate at very different rates.
Compare Two Areas
Cost of living · same household
Set what a category would actually cost you in each area; leave a field blank to use the local benchmark.
Housing compares local market rent (HUD FY2026, sized to your household) in both areas; owners with a paid-off home or an older mortgage sit below that line by design. Savings & Pensions is national in both columns, and it is mostly Social Security & Medicare payroll taxes (FICA) plus retirement contributions, not discretionary saving.
How This Works
Data sources and methodology
This tool compares your household spending against similar U.S. households. Housing is anchored to HUD Fair Market Rents for your selected location -- not derived from a national average. For micropolitan and non-metro areas, non-housing price adjustments use statewide BEA averages (the finest granularity BEA publishes); a reference override lets you substitute a nearby metro's price data. All other categories use BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey baselines adjusted by BEA Regional Price Parities. Not financial advice.
National Spending Baselines
BLS CE 2024 · released 2025-12-19
Peer benchmarks for all non-housing categories are anchored to BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey published means by income quintile, with dampened size and age adjustments (0.5× deviation ratios from CE Tables 1400 and 1300) to reduce double-counting of correlated demographics.
Savings & Pensions is the BLS "personal insurance and pensions" category: Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes (FICA), voluntary retirement contributions (401(k), IRA, self-employment plans), and life insurance premiums. For most working households the mandatory FICA share is the largest piece. National averages; no local price adjustment. The row can be excluded entirely via its toggle, which is useful for retirees with no payroll income or for pure consumption comparisons. Note: taxable brokerage saving and mortgage principal are not captured by this category, so dedicated savers should expect to exceed this benchmark.
The optional CPI projection is category-specific (BLS CPI news release, March 2026): a uniform all-items leg carries 2024 survey-year baselines to March 2025 (+1.9%), then each category applies its own 12-month change ending March 2026: Food +2.7%, Shelter +3.0%, Medical care +3.1%, Recreation +2.2%, Apparel +3.4%, household energy services +5.0%. Transportation, Other, and Savings & Pensions use the all-items figure (+3.3%) because BLS group-level numbers for those composites are not vendored; gasoline alone rose 18.9% over that year, so treat Transportation as conservative in early 2026. Housing ignores this projection whenever a location is set (HUD FY2026 rents are already current).
HUD FY2026 · county-level matched to 739 LOCS entries
The housing row shows local market rent -- HUD Fair Market Rent for your selected area, sized to your household (studio through 4BR). It is a reference point for what renting your home would cost locally, not a claim about what peers spend: homeowners with a paid-off home or an older mortgage will typically spend well below this line, and that is a feature of their situation, not an error. FMRs are the 40th percentile of gross rents; the optional median toggle shows HUD's published 50th-percentile estimate instead where available (in a few floor-protected rural areas HUD's administrative FMR sits above the raw median, and the tool shows the published figures as-is) -- a conservative estimate below the market median in fast-appreciating areas.
The Compare Two Areas section applies the identical engine and household profile to a second area; only the location-driven inputs change (HUD rent schedule sized to your household, BEA regional price indexes). “vs national” compares each area to the national benchmark for the same household.
Metro and county entries use HUD-published FY2026 FMR schedules matched to their HUD Fair Market Rent area; sub-areas of a metro (e.g. Brooklyn, Douglas County CO) carry their parent FMR area's schedule, as HUD publishes one schedule per FMR area. Entries we could not match to a specific HUD FMR area are marked "Statewide average" (dq=0) and use the state-level figure: an honest approximation rather than area-specific data.
Childcare benchmarks use the DOL Women's Bureau National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP), which compiles county-level median prices from state CCDF Market Rate Surveys.
Prices are inflated from their 2022 survey base to 2025 using the BLS CPI for Tuition, Other School Fees, and Childcare (CUSR0000SEEB).
When the "full-time paid childcare" toggle is on, the benchmark reflects center-based care prices from the NDCP, weighted by an age distribution of children that varies by reference person age and household size. School-age tiers are excluded (children in full-time daycare are pre-school-age). The number of children in care can be overridden manually.
County-level NDCP medians (center- and home-based, by age tier) are applied for 648 areas via each area’s principal county; statewide and multi-county region entries fall back to the state model. Prices are the DOL’s latest study-year medians per county, annualized, then CPI-adjusted on the same path as the state data.
Non-housing prices use BEA Regional Price Parities (national = 100). Food, transportation, and apparel map to the Goods index; healthcare and entertainment to Services: Other; utilities and the residual Other category to All Items. Vintage and basis: state figures are the official 2024 release (Feb 2026); metro figures are all metros at official MSA-2024 (a one-command drop-in script ships alongside this tool).
Data integrity note (v1.5 audit): the price parities shipped in earlier versions were not faithful BEA values: the Services index duplicated the All-Items index on 682 of 739 rows, and several majors drifted 9–22 points from official figures (Denver's rents parity read 125 against an official 147). v1.5 rebuilt every row from official BEA data under a strict latest-per-geography policy, and the test harness now asserts the official band on all 739 rows. Micropolitan and rural entries use official statewide figures (clearly flagged), and you can still override with a nearby metro's data.
Food scales by the BEA goods parity, the same treatment as transportation and apparel. Versions before v1.7.0 applied an additional regional food factor on top of this; it was removed because no current official source publishes cross-region food price levels and the goods parity already reflects regional food prices.
All data is US Government public domain (HUD, BEA, BLS, DOL). Benchmarks reflect statistical peer averages. Confirm any spending decisions with a fee-only financial advisor.
BiggerPockets Money · Budget Lab
How to read this. These are peer reference benchmarks: descriptions of what statistically similar households spend, not recommended spending targets and not financial advice. The peer benchmark reflects what a statistically similar household (matched on income quintile, household size, and age bracket) spends. The housing row is the exception: it shows local market rent (HUD FMR for your location and bedroom count) as a reference point -- if you own your home, your actual cost is likely lower, and the gap is your imputed housing advantage; all other categories use national BLS CE baselines adjusted by BEA RPP for your area. For non-metro areas, non-housing RPP uses the statewide average -- you can override this with a nearby metro's data using the "Override price reference" option in the location panel. Leave a category blank to use the peer benchmark as your spend. The flexibility slider (0 to 100%) on each row sets what fraction of that category you consider adjustable.
Limitations. FMRs are the 40th percentile of rental costs, not the median. BEA price parities are regional indexes, not neighborhood-level. Healthcare varies enormously within a region. Income, age, and size multipliers are national patterns and do not vary by geography. Use as a directional benchmark, not a precise budget target.