What a school-age child costs across a year

There are published figures for the average cost of raising an Australian child, and they are close to useless for planning a household budget. They average across public and private schooling, city and regional costs, one child and four, and the range inside the average is larger than the average itself.

What is actually useful is the list of categories, the month each one lands in, and the ones people forget. You can then put your own numbers against them, which is the only version that will be true for your house.

The twelve categories

Work through these, put your own figure against each, and you will have something better than any national average.

Fixed and predictable

1. School fees or contributions. Public schools charge voluntary contributions, and most families pay something. Private and independent schooling is a different order of magnitude
2. Uniform. The single most underestimated line, and it is not once. Growth, loss and wear mean it recurs. School uniform costs covers what a year actually needs
3. Books, stationery and book packs. The two items that get replaced rather than repaired are the bag and the pencil case, and buying once is the whole saving: school backpacks and pencil cases that survive a year
4. Devices. A laptop or tablet for BYOD schools, plus its replacement cycle, insurance and accessories
5. Transport. Bus pass, fuel, or the extra car trip twice a day

Recurring through the year

1. Food. School lunches, and the quiet fact that a child’s food cost rises sharply through the teenage years
2. Shoes and clothing outside uniform. Children outgrow shoes on their own schedule, not the budget’s
3. Excursions, incursions and camps. Camps in particular are large, lumpy and often late notice
4. Sport and extracurricular activities, which is the category most likely to exceed everything above it. What sport and extracurricular activities cost covers it properly
5. Birthdays. Both theirs and the twenty other children’s parties they are invited to

Lumpy and occasional

1. Technology and phones, plans and replacements. The rules around the device are cheaper to set than the device is to replace, which is what a family device agreement is for
2. Everything else: haircuts, medical gaps, school photos, fundraisers, hobby supplies, the year 6 graduation, the formal

When it lands, which matters more than the total

Australian household budgets are not broken by the annual total. They are broken by January.

• January: uniform, shoes, books and stationery, device, first term fees, and the activity registration season all in one fortnight, immediately after Christmas. This is the spike, and it is the entire reason a budget that works on paper fails in practice. What back to school actually costs per child covers this month in detail
• February and March: swimming, activity terms starting, first excursions
• Mid-year: winter uniform, second semester fees, camps
• Term 3 and 4: end of season sport costs, school photos, presentations
• December: Christmas, immediately before January

Two clusters, four weeks apart, at the end and start of the year. Everything else is comparatively manageable.

The costs households consistently forget

These are the ones that turn a good budget into an overdrawn one:

• Replacement, not purchase. Budgets are built for buying a school bag once. Children lose hats, break drink bottles, destroy shoes, and leave jumpers at school
• Camp, which arrives with a few weeks notice and is often several hundred dollars
• The fundraiser economy. Chocolate drives, fun runs, mufti days, raffle books, disco tickets. Individually trivial, collectively not
• Other children’s birthday parties. A present every few weeks through primary school
• Before and after school care, which can be the largest single line for working parents and is frequently left off entirely
• School photos, which are optional right up until your child is the only one without them
• Growth spurts, which do not wait for a budget cycle
• The second child effect, where hand-me-downs work for clothing and almost nothing else

Where money comes back

Worth knowing before you conclude the number is impossible.

• State activity and sport vouchers. Most states run one, and they are consistently under-claimed. They are covered in the sport and extracurricular article
• School uniform assistance, which exists in every state and is arranged through the school office
• Payment plans, which most schools offer for fees, camps and devices and rarely advertise
• Secondhand. Uniform shops, marketplace, school swap groups. Winter items and blazers in particular
• Centrelink payments, where eligible. Services Australia is the authority on what applies to your household, not an article
• Selling on what has been outgrown, which is a real if modest offset

Building your own number

Twenty minutes, once, and it beats any published figure.

1. Write the twelve categories down the page
2. Put last year’s actual figure against each where you can. Bank and card statements are more honest than memory
3. Estimate the rest conservatively, then add about 15 per cent, because the estimate is always low
4. Mark which month each one lands in. This is the step that matters
5. Divide the annual total by twelve and move that amount somewhere separate each month
6. Revisit it once a year, in about October, before the December and January cluster arrives

Step five is the whole trick. The costs are lumpy and the income is not, so the only thing that makes a school year survivable is smoothing it across twelve months rather than meeting it in two. A family budget that survives a real month is the mechanism for doing that.

The honest summary

Nobody can tell you what your child costs, and anybody who gives you a single national figure is selling something or filling a word count.

What is knowable is that the categories are stable, the calendar is predictable, the January cluster is the thing that actually hurts, and roughly half of the forgotten costs are replacements rather than purchases. Budget for the calendar rather than the total and most of the difficulty goes away.