50/30/20 Budget Calculator
The 50/30/20 rule is the simplest budget worth using: half your take-home pay to needs, 30% to wants, 20% to savings and debt payoff. Put your income in and this splits it out. The useful part is usually the gap between the split and what you actually spend.
The must-pays: housing, groceries, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments, transportation.
The nice-to-haves: dining out, streaming, hobbies, travel, upgrades you could live without.
Building your future: emergency fund, retirement contributions, and paying debt down faster than the minimum.
The 50/30/20 rule is a starting point, not a law — in high-cost areas needs may run over 50%, and if you're behind on savings you may want to push past 20%. Ready to go deeper? The Budget Planner maps every bill to a paycheck.
What goes in each bucket
- Needs (50%) — housing, utilities, groceries, transport, insurance, childcare, and the minimum payment on every debt. The test is whether skipping it has a consequence beyond disappointment.
- Wants (30%) — eating out, streaming, hobbies, travel, the upgrade rather than the replacement. Most of the discretion in a budget lives here, which is why it is the bucket worth measuring rather than guessing at.
- Savings and debt payoff (20%) — the emergency fund, retirement contributions, and anything paid toward a debt above its minimum. Extra principal counts here, not in needs: it is a choice, and it builds net worth the same way saving does.
It is a starting point, not a rule
Half of take-home to needs assumes housing costs a normal share of income, which is not true everywhere. In an expensive city, rent alone can take 40% and the split is unreachable without a flatmate or a move — neither of which a budget rule can decide for you. The response is not to abandon the framework but to read it as a diagnosis: if needs are at 65%, that is the number to work on, and no amount of trimming the wants bucket substitutes.
The reverse case matters too. If your needs come in well under half, the rule is quietly giving you permission to spend 30% on wants — and the 20% floor for savings is a floor, not a target.
Percentages of take-home, not gross
Every figure here is a share of what actually reaches your account. Budgeting off gross pay counts money that was never yours to allocate: tax, national insurance or FICA, pension or 401(k) deferrals and insurance premiums have all gone before payday. That is also why the pension contributions taken from your payslip sit outside this split rather than inside the 20% — you never saw them.
A budget built around your real pay dates rather than a monthly average is what the budget planner does with an account; this page is the version that needs nothing.
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