Household Expenses List UK: 36 Items with Typical £ Amounts (2026)

A list of household expenses is only useful with a number beside each item, and the UK numbers come from one survey: the Office for National Statistics’ Family Spending, which asks about 5,000 households to keep a diary of everything they buy. The figures below are from the detailed table for the financial year ending March 2025, published in June 2026, converted from weekly to monthly by multiplying by 52 and dividing by 12. They are averages across every household, owners and renters, with and without children, so a renting family’s rent and a nursery bill will sit far above the figure shown; the use of the column is the ranking and the order of magnitude. Where a bill has an official 2026 price, the council tax, the energy cap, water, the TV licence and rent, that figure is in the third column.

The UK household expenses list

The same list, with a blank for your own amount, is a printable checklist and a CSV that opens in Google Sheets or Excel: download the PDF checklist or download the CSV. Both are free and ask for no email address. The US version of this article, in dollars, with the full list by group and how to set a cap on each category, is the monthly household expenses list. The £319 grocery line is the all-household average; the grocery budget calculator gives the ONS figure for your own household type, from the same release.

What a family of four spends, by category

The all-household average hides the family. The ONS publishes the same survey by household composition, and two adults with two children spent £883.20 a week in the year to March 2025, about £3,827 a month, against £676.60 for the average household. The category figures below are the family ones; the housing line is the ONS definition, which excludes mortgage capital repayments and council tax and puts them in the final row.

Transport is the largest line for a family with children, ahead of housing, because the ONS housing figure leaves out the mortgage; add the £624 of mortgage payments and council tax from the last row and housing is where it is for everyone else. The US and Canadian family figures, and how the shares transfer to a budget of your own size, are in how much a family of four spends a month.

The bills with an official 2026 price

Five UK bills have a published figure for this year, which is more useful than a survey average for planning the next twelve months.

• —Council tax. The average Band D bill in England is £2,392 for 2026–27, up £111 or 4.9% on the year, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s release of 25 March 2026; London averages £2,068, metropolitan areas £2,409, unitary areas £2,490 and shire areas £2,452. Most councils bill it over ten months, so a Band D household pays about £239 a month from April to January and nothing in February and March, which is the first irregular cost on the list.
• —Gas and electricity. Ofgem’s price cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026 puts a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit at about £1,723 a year, £144 a month, up 4% on the previous quarter; the rise is almost all gas, after VAT was removed from domestic electricity. The cap is a limit on unit rates and standing charges, so a household that uses more pays more. The next cap, from 1 January 2027, is forecast to rise again.
• —Water and sewerage. The average combined bill in England and Wales is £639 for 2026–27, about £53 a month, up £33 or 5.4%, according to Water UK; company bills range from £587 at Severn Trent to £674 at Anglian Water.
• —TV licence. £180 a year from 1 April 2026, up £5.50, set by the government in line with inflation; £15 a month if paid by direct debit, and it rises again in April 2027.
• —Rent. The ONS Price Index of Private Rents put the average monthly rent at £1,400 in the UK and £1,459 in England in the twelve months to August 2026, up 3.8% and 4.0%. The ONS survey figure of £289 in the table is averaged across all households including owners; a renting household should use the index figure, or its own tenancy.

Costs the UK list has that other countries do not

Three lines on a UK list have no equivalent on an American one, and all three are easy to leave out of a budget built from a US template. Council tax is a separate bill, billed by the local authority over ten instalments, with a 25% single-person discount and bands that depend on a 1991 valuation. The TV licence is a legal requirement for watching live television or BBC iPlayer, paid annually or by monthly direct debit. And National Insurance comes off a payslip before anything is spent: the average household pays £147 a month, on top of £202 of pension contributions and life assurance, which is why the single largest household outgoing in the ONS table is not on any monthly budget at all. On the other side, a UK household has no health insurance premium to budget for beyond any private cover, where the average US household pays $338 a month.

Childcare, the line the average hides most

The ONS average for nursery, crèche and childminder fees is £16 a month, because most households pay none. For a family that does, Coram Family and Childcare’s 2026 survey puts a full-time nursery place for a child under two in England at £148.82 a week after the government-funded hours are applied, about £645 a month, down 39% on 2025 because the 30 funded hours now extend to younger children; Wales, at £325 a week, is now the most expensive nation for under-twos, and Scotland is at £259. Families who do not qualify for the funded hours pay the full rate. If this line applies to you, it is the one to write in the blank before any other.

Fixed, variable and irregular, in UK terms

Rent or mortgage, council tax, the TV licence, broadband and insurance premiums are fixed: the same amount on the same day, which a budget reserves first. Energy, food, fuel and everything in recreation are variable, and the category cap is what keeps them inside the month. The irregular costs are the ones that break a UK budget: car tax and the MOT once a year, insurance renewals that quietly rise, the February and March council tax gap that tempts a household to spend the money it is not being billed, school uniform in August, and the energy cap resetting every quarter. The method for turning the list into category caps with a buffer for those is in how to create a shared family budget, and the category list itself in family budget categories.

How this works in CapKin

The limits first. CapKin holds none of these averages and will not tell you whether your council tax or your food bill is above or below them; it is a shared household budget, not a comparison tool, and it gives no financial advice. It connects to no bank, so nothing above is imported; every figure in it exists because someone in the household entered it. The interface is in English, it runs in a web browser and installs as a web app, and it is free during beta with paid plans not announced.

What it does is turn the list into caps. A household budget runs in one currency, so a UK family sets it up in pounds, chooses its categories, puts a monthly cap on each and an overall cap on the month, and then every member logs spending by voice or by typing against those caps, with children’s entries waiting for a parent’s approval. The groups in the table above are a reasonable starting set of categories, trimmed to the eight to twelve a family will actually use. Every product claim is stated in full on the product facts page.

Sources

• —Office for National Statistics. Family Spending in the UK, financial year ending 2025, published 11 June 2026. Workbook 1, Table A1: detailed expenditure, average weekly household expenditure, all households (£676.60 total; 5,000 households in sample). Workbook 2, Table A23: expenditure by household composition, two adults with two children, £883.20 a week. Weekly figures converted to monthly by multiplying by 52 and dividing by 12.
• —Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Council Tax levels set by local authorities in England 2026 to 2027, published 25 March 2026: average Band D council tax £2,392, up £111 (4.9%); London £2,068, metropolitan areas £2,409, unitary areas £2,490, shire areas £2,452; 274 of 384 authorities used the maximum flexibility.
• —Ofgem energy price cap, 1 October to 31 December 2026, as reported by Uswitch and Money to the Masses: typical dual-fuel direct-debit household £1,723 a year (one report gives £1,725), up 4% from £1,663; typical consumption assumptions revised in July 2026 to 9,500 kWh gas and 2,500 kWh electricity.
• —Water UK, 2026–27 charges, as reported by MoneySavingExpert and Money to the Masses, January 2026: average combined water and sewerage bill £639, up £33 (5.4%) from £606; Severn Trent £587, Anglian Water £674.
• —Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Cost of TV licence fee set for 2026/27, press release: colour licence £180 from 1 April 2026, up £5.50 from £174.50, a 3.15% rise in line with CPI; black-and-white licence £60.50.
• —Office for National Statistics. Private rent and house prices, UK: September 2026. Average private rent £1,400 a month in the UK (up 3.8%) and £1,459 in England (up 4.0%) in the twelve months to August 2026.
• —Coram Family and Childcare. Childcare Survey 2026: full-time (50 hours) nursery place for a child under two in England £148.82 a week including funded hours, down 39% on 2025; Wales £325 a week; Scotland £259 a week.
• —US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024, all consumer units, for the US comparison figures (health insurance $4,055 a year).
• —CapKin product facts, last verified 4 August 2026.