Allowance Raise Schedule: How Much to Increase It Each Birthday

Build your own schedule

Put in what you pay now and pick how you want raises to work. The in today's money column is the one worth watching: it restates each future allowance in the purchasing power of your starting year, so a raise below the inflation rate shows up as the pay cut it is.

Where these numbers come from

The top table is not a recommendation and it is not a survey of what families ought to pay. It is the published average weekly allowance at each single year of age, with each row subtracted from the one below it:

raise at this age = average at this age − average at the previous age

The levels come from Greenlight's 2025 data — the average weekly amount paid by families using the Greenlight app. That is the important caveat, and it is worth stating plainly: this is app data from a self-selected group of families who already use a paid kids' banking product. Greenlight publishes no sample size and no methodology. It is not a nationally representative survey, so read it as "what a large group of allowance-paying families do" rather than "the American average". No nationally representative figure appears to exist, which is why nothing on this page claims one.

What makes the series useful anyway is that it is internally consistent: the same measurement at fourteen consecutive ages. Whatever bias it has applies at every age, so the shape of the curve — the part this page is about — survives even if the levels are high or low.

How much of a raise is just inflation?

Prices rose 2.6% in 2025, measured as the annual average change in CPI-U. A raise of exactly that much leaves your child no better off; it keeps them where they were. Anything above it is a real raise, and anything below it is a cut they won't notice until the same money buys less.

That is what the last column of the top table measures. At age 6 the observed raise is +4.21%, so only about 1.6 percentage points of it are real. At 17 the raise is +20.01% and the great majority of it is real growth.

The reverse case is starker. An allowance of $6.18 set at age five and never raised is worth $4.43 in age-five dollars by the time the child turns eighteen — a 28% cut for doing nothing at all. Standing still costs money.

What the whole schedule costs

Nobody publishes this figure, and it is the one a parent actually commits to when they agree to a raise every birthday. Paying the observed average every week from age five through seventeen comes to $7,388.16. Carry it through the eighteenth year and the total is $8,688.68.

That is not an argument against allowance. It is the size of the decision, which is worth knowing before you make it fourteen times in a row without noticing. The generator above totals the same figure for whatever schedule you choose.

The "$1 per year of age" rule, checked

It is the most repeated allowance rule on the internet and almost nobody checks it against anything. Set against the observed averages, it is neither right nor uniformly wrong — it is wrong in two opposite directions at different ages.

The rule pays too little to the youngest children, too much through the middle years, and far too little to teenagers. It is about 19% low at five, climbs to roughly 18% high around ten and eleven, crosses back over at 15, and by eighteen is 28% below what the data shows. Its real appeal was never accuracy — it is that it is easy to remember and removes the annual negotiation. Those are genuine advantages, and they are the reason to use it, if you use it.

Raising for a new responsibility instead of a birthday

A birthday raise and a responsibility raise signal different things. The birthday version is predictable, needs no justification, and can be agreed once and then forgotten — which is most of its value, because it takes the raise out of the realm of negotiation. Its weakness is that it is unconnected to anything the child did.

Tying a raise to a new chore or a widened remit — the allowance now has to cover their own gifts for friends, say — makes the increase legible. The trade-off is that every raise becomes a conversation, and a child who wants more money learns to propose new duties rather than to wait. Some families run both: the birthday raise happens automatically, and anything above it has to be argued for. Whether to attach money to chores at all is a separate question, covered in should you pay kids for chores. If you want the added chores priced rather than guessed, the chore rate calculator derives each one from wage data.

Sources

• Average weekly allowance by single year of age, 2025 — age 5 $6.18, 8 $7.22, 12 $10.37, 15 $15.26, 18 $25.01, and every age between — Greenlight, 2025 data. This is app data from families using Greenlight, with no published sample size or methodology. It is not a nationally representative survey. Checked 3 August 2026.
• Annual average change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): 2.6% in 2025, 2.9% in 2024, 4.1% in 2023 — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via this published CPI-U series. Checked 3 August 2026.

Related

This page is about changing an allowance you already pay. For setting one in the first place, the allowance calculator works from age and what the money is expected to cover, and how much allowance by age has the level chart. If your child is saving the increase toward something, the savings goal calculator turns a weekly amount into a number of weeks, and Bank of Dad keeps the running balance so you don't have to. The rest of the free calculators are here.

Frequently asked questions