Daily Spending Allowance Calculator: Your Number Per Day (Free)

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and it keeps working with the connection off. It answers one question that a monthly budget never quite does: how much can I spend today? You give it four figures, income, fixed bills, a savings target and the days left in the month, and it returns a daily allowance, a weekly version of the same number and a line that shows what tomorrow looks like if you spend a given amount today.

How to use it

1. Enter your take-home income. The amount that reaches your account this month, after tax and deductions. If you have two income sources, add them. If your income moves around, use a cautious figure, such as the lowest month in the last six, and treat anything above it as a bonus that goes to savings when it arrives.
2. Enter your fixed bills. Everything that leaves on a set date for a roughly set amount: rent or mortgage, utilities, phone and internet, insurance, subscriptions, loan and card minimums, childcare. This is the field that decides whether the daily number is honest. Most people underestimate it by the two or three subscriptions they have stopped noticing, so check last month's statement rather than working from memory.
3. Enter a savings target. What you want to move to savings this month before it can be spent. It can be zero. The reason it sits above the line, rather than being whatever is left at the end, is that whatever is left at the end is usually nothing.
4. Check the days left. The field fills itself from today's date, counting today. If you budget from payday to payday, change it to the days until the next one. The calculator does not care what the period is called; it only divides.
5. Read the number, then test tomorrow. The big figure is today's allowance. Under it, the weekly figure is the same number times seven, capped at what is left in the month. Type an amount in the last field to see the tomorrow line: if you spend that much today, here is what tomorrow's allowance becomes. It is the most useful line on the page, because it shows the cost of a decision before you make it.

What the daily allowance means here

The arithmetic is short. Spendable money for the month is income minus fixed bills minus the savings target. The daily allowance is that pool divided by the days left, including today. The weekly allowance is the daily figure times seven. The tomorrow line takes the pool, subtracts what you say you will spend today, and divides by one day fewer.

What makes this more than a division is what sits inside the pool. The daily number has to cover everything variable: groceries, transport that is not a fixed pass, lunches, coffee, the pharmacy, small things for the house, a gift. That is deliberate. Those categories are where most months are lost, and they are lost precisely because nobody assigns them a number small enough to feel. A monthly grocery budget is a figure you check on the 28th, if at all. A daily allowance of 34 is a figure you notice in the queue at the supermarket.

The number also moves. Spend 20 on a day with a 34 allowance and the 14 you did not spend stays in the pool, so tomorrow's number rises slightly. Spend 60 and tomorrow's number falls. This is gentler than the way a monthly budget fails, which is silently, on the 22nd, with a week to go. The correction here is a few units a day in either direction, and it starts the next morning.

The days field counts from today because the money you have not spent today is still yours to spend today. If you calculate on the 15th of a 30-day month, the divisor is 16, not 15.

Where the rule stops working

A daily allowance is a pacing tool, and pacing only helps when there is something to pace.

When the pool is zero or negative. If fixed bills plus the savings target exceed income, the calculator shows zero and the size of the shortfall. Nothing about dividing by days helps here. The first move is to set the savings target to zero for this month; the second is to look hard at the bills figure and decide which items are truly fixed. If the pool is still negative, this is a month that needs more than a calculator, and public guidance such as the CFPB's budget worksheet or a conversation with a qualified adviser is the right next step. The tool will not pretend otherwise.

When the pool is very small. A daily allowance of 6 is mathematically correct and practically useless, because a single grocery shop breaks it. When the daily number is that low, work in weeks instead: the weekly figure on the page is the same money over seven days, and one shop plus a few small things fit inside it more naturally. The guide on setting a daily budget covers how to choose the period.

When spending is lumpy on purpose. A big grocery shop every ten days, a monthly train ticket bought on the 3rd, a birthday in the third week. Lumpy spending makes the daily number swing: a large day pushes tomorrow's allowance down sharply, and a string of small days pushes it up. The number is still right, but it can feel wrong. Two fixes: move the predictable lumps into fixed bills, or read the weekly figure instead of the daily one on the days that follow a big shop.

When the fixed bills figure is stale. The calculator is only as honest as the bills total. A subscription that renewed quietly, an insurance premium that rose, a card minimum that grew: any of these makes the pool look larger than it is, and the daily number inherits the error. Recheck the figure at the start of each month. Tracking subscriptions and recurring bills is a guide to keeping that list true.

When days are not the right unit. Someone who eats every meal at home and shops once a week does not spend daily, and a daily number will nag them for nothing. Someone paid weekly may prefer a weekly pool with a seven-day divisor. The tool is indifferent; set the days field to the period that matches how money actually leaves.

Worked examples

Example 1: a calendar month. Take-home income is $3,400. Fixed bills are $1,900, made up of $1,250 rent, $210 utilities and phone, $140 insurance, $180 loan minimum and $120 subscriptions. The savings target is $300. The pool is $1,200. On the 1st of a 30-day month the daily allowance is $40.00 and the weekly figure $280. If you spend $65 today, the pool drops to $1,135 across 29 days and tomorrow's allowance becomes $39.14. Spend $20 instead and tomorrow's allowance becomes $40.69.

Example 2: mid-month, behind. Same income and bills. It is the 18th of a 31-day month, so 14 days remain, and only $380 of the pool is left because the first half of the month ran hot. The daily allowance is $27.14. Type $50 for today's spend, perhaps a grocery run, and tomorrow's allowance becomes $25.38. The tool does not scold; it shows the pace, and $25 a day for two weeks is a plan.

Example 3: paid every two weeks. Pay is $1,600 per cycle. Bills leaving during this cycle are $900. Savings target is $150. Set days left to 14. The pool is $550 and the daily allowance is $39.29, weekly $275. The next payday, run it again with the bills that fall in that cycle, which may be different.

Example 4: the pool is negative. Income $2,100, fixed bills $1,850, savings target $400. The calculator shows a spendable figure of minus $150 and a daily allowance of zero. Setting savings to zero gives a pool of $250, or about $8 a day over a month. That is a month to read in weeks, at $58 a week, and to spend looking at the bills list rather than the daily number.

From the number to the habit

The calculator gives you today's number once. The value is in seeing it every day, adjusted for what you actually spent, and that requires logging fast enough that you keep doing it.

Cash Book's Budgets hold a monthly or weekly allowance and show the amount left under the big number on Home. Set the pool from this calculator as the monthly allowance, or the weekly figure as a weekly one if that is how you think, and each purchase you log brings the remaining amount down in real time. The app does not display a per-day figure, so on days when you want it, divide what is left by the days remaining; the arithmetic is the same as on this page.

Logging is what makes the remaining amount true. The voice logger takes "coffee three fifty and groceries forty-two" and turns it into two transactions with tags and today's date. The keypad is three taps for an entry when you would rather not speak. Apple Pay taps can log themselves through a one-time Shortcuts automation. When logging costs seconds, the allowance on Home matches your bank account, and the daily number stops being an estimate.

For the surrounding routine, how to make a monthly budget that sticks covers deciding the pool at the start of each month, and how to track cash spending is for the part of daily spending that never shows up on a statement.

The other tools

The 50/30/20 budget calculator decides how much of income is spendable in the first place; this tool paces that amount. The savings goal calculator tells you what the savings target you typed here buys, and when. The subscription cost calculator totals the recurring lines that belong in the fixed bills field. The small purchases calculator shows what a daily habit does to the daily allowance over a year, and the hours of work calculator reprices a purchase in the time it took to earn.

Where to go next

Run the calculator on the first of the month with a bills figure you have checked against a statement. Set the pool as an allowance in Budgets, log for the month, and on the last day compare the amount left with zero. If it is close, the pool was right. If it went negative early, the bills figure was probably light, and the subscription guide is the next read. If the daily number felt too small to be useful, the guide on setting a daily budget explains how to pick a period that fits how you shop, and the student guide covers the tightest version of this problem, where the pool is small and the term is long.

A daily allowance does not make a month cheaper. It makes the cost of today visible before today is over, which is the moment when a number can still change a decision.

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Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.