The Cost of Raising a Child in the UK

The detail

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Cost of a Child in 2025 report, published in October 2025, is the standard UK estimate of what it costs to raise a child. It puts the full cost of raising a child to age 18 at £251,018 (about £250,000) for a couple family and £287,219 (nearly £290,000) for a lone-parent family. These headline totals include rent, childcare and council tax.

The figures come from the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) - research by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asks members of the public to agree what goods and services a household needs for a minimum socially acceptable standard of living. The cost of a child is the difference that child adds to that budget, priced up over each year of childhood and summed to age 18.

Stripping out rent, childcare and council tax gives a "basic cost" of £167,679 for a couple and £189,053 for a lone parent. CPAG says the cost of a child is higher for a lone parent primarily because of economies of scale within household budgets, which benefit couples more than single people - for example, a family car replaces public transport fares for two adults in a couple but only one for a lone parent.

CPAG stresses that many families cannot actually cover these costs from their income. For a family with two children aged 3 and 7, net income (after rent, childcare and council tax) covers only 37% of the minimum cost of living for an out-of-work couple and 44% for an out-of-work lone parent. A couple working full time on the minimum wage covers 82%, a lone parent working full time on the minimum wage 69%, and even a couple both on the median wage only 98%. The September 2025 expansion of funded childcare to 30 hours a week for eligible working parents of children from nine months old has since reduced childcare bills for those families - see our UK childcare costs page.