Costs of Raising a Child According to research from the USDA, the cost of raising a child to 18 in the average American, two-parent, two-child household is around $200,000.  In general, as the age of the child increases, so do the annual expenditures.  These numbers, of course, depend on several different factors and include several different expenditures as the child gets older that we’ll discuss in this article. The amount of raising children can fluctuate based on a number of reasons including:  location, your household’s income, marital status, how many children you have, and the age of those children.  According to the USDA report, child-rearing expenses are the most in the urban Northeast.  These overall expenses decrease across the urban West and Midwest and are lowest in the South and all rural areas across the country.  You might be surprised to learn, though, housing and transportation were highest in the urban West. Trends of single parent households generally follow the same tendency as two-parent households in that as the child gets older, the expenses become greater.  Some good news, however, is that as you have more children, the average cost of raising those children decrease.  Something that may not be very surprising is that as the income level of a household rises so do the annual average expenditures. Housing expenses are the largest of all child-rearing costs followed by child care and education.  Sometimes, these expenses can be directly related.  Such as, families may move to different neighborhoods for specific school districts or to move closer to family members to provide their child care.  Other major expenses include food, transportation, clothing, health care, etc.  For the past 50 years, the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion has been providing child-rearing expense estimates in order to help families better budget and to provide for the economic interest of children in America.  While the percentage of food and clothing spent on a child has decreased since 1960, the cost of health care has skyrocketed.  The percentage of health care for a child has doubled which is no surprise as to why it’s receiving so much attention in today’s news. If you are starting to think about your family’s budget or are looking to have children in the future, the USDA’s CNPP provides a Cost of Raising a Child Calculator tool that is most helpful when figuring out how much that bundle of joy is going to cost.

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