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. The lone-parent total is higher than the couple total largely because a lone parent needs to pay for childcare that a two-parent household can partly cover between themselves, and cannot share fixed household costs.

CPAG stresses that many families cannot actually cover these costs from their income. It reports that an out-of-work couple with two children can meet only 37% of their basic costs through benefits, and even a couple both working full time on the National Living Wage cover around 60%. The September 2025 rollout of funded childcare for children aged 9 to 24 months has since reduced childcare bills for eligible working families - see our UK childcare costs page.