Am I spending too much?

There is no single right number, because it depends on how many people you feed and what you earn. Across all US households the middle figure is $552 a month in July 2026 dollars, but that lumps a person living alone together with a family of five. A one-person household sits near $351 and a household of five or more near $966. This page compares you against households of your own size and income instead of against everybody.

The 30% rule is a guideline, not a measurement. It descends from a 1969 statutory cap on public housing rent, not from research into what households can sustain. It is a reasonable starting line and it says nothing about whether your rent is normal for people in your situation — plenty of households above it are fine, and some below it are not, depending on everything else leaving their accounts. Among renters the middle US household pays $1,386 a month; the table on this page shows what that becomes at your income and household size.

The payment on its own is the wrong unit. Insurance, fuel and registration arrive with the car and vary between households more than the payment does, so this page compares the whole running cost of getting around — payment, insurance, gas, registration and transit fares. The middle US household spends $466 a month on that, and a three-person household earning $75,000 to $99,999 typically spends $645. Buying the car is left out on purpose: it is a lump, not a monthly rate.

It is the share of comparable households that spend less than you. At the 71st percentile, 71 out of every 100 households of your size and income spend less on that category and 29 spend more. It is a position, not a grade — the page does not tell you whether the number is good, because that depends on the rest of your money.

Because it cannot know. Whether spending more than comparable households matters depends on everything else leaving your account before your next payday, and a page with four inputs has no way to see that. It shows where you land and what the gap is in dollars, and stops there. A test in the codebase checks the headline sentence for verdict words on every possible answer.

People answer the grocery question in round weekly numbers — “about $150 a week” — so the underlying data clusters on a handful of amounts instead of spreading smoothly. Several groups therefore share the same middle figure, which is real rather than a mistake. It also means many households are tied on the most common answers: when your amount is one of them the page reports the middle of the tied group rather than its bottom edge, so giving a popular answer does not rank you lower than it should, and it tells you how large that tied group is.

They run 17% to 30% higher, at every household size, and it is the difference between two questions rather than an error. The published average comes from households writing down every purchase in a two-week diary. These come from the survey's other question, which asks a household what it usually spends in a week — and a remembered usual amount runs reliably above a recorded one. Since you are also giving a remembered amount, comparing you against other people's remembered amounts is the fair fight; comparing you against their receipts would tell almost everyone they overspend.

Two government surveys. Groceries and transportation come from the Consumer Expenditure Survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — its household-level microdata for 2022 and 2023, 38,052 household interviews, the same survey the inflation basket is built from. Rent comes from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2024, 336,074 renter households, which is what lets it go local. The grocery question was retired after the first quarter of 2024, and that final partial wave is pooled in here, so this is the last household-level data of its kind that will ever exist; levels are carried to July 2026 using the official price index for each category, and the page says which dollars it is quoting.

If you give a ZIP, yes — as far as each survey honestly allows. Rent is compared against renters in your metro area, or your state where the metro has too few renters to say anything reliable. Groceries and transportation are compared against households in your Census region: the Northeast, the Midwest, the South or the West, which is the finest place that survey carries. Without a ZIP the comparison is national, which is complete and honest — a ZIP makes it sharper, not correct.

The amounts you type stay in your browser, and the comparison runs against tables loaded into it (two more — local rent, and spending by region — download the moment you start typing a ZIP). We do record that a comparison was made, which category, your income band and household size, whether the answer was national, regional, state or metro, and the resulting percentile, so we can see whether the tool is useful — never the dollar amounts, and never the ZIP itself. There is no account, no email field and no bank connection on this page.