Trip Budget Calculator

List every cost category — accommodation, food, local transport, activities, flights, insurance, visa fees and miscellaneous extras — and total them into a subtotal. Then add a contingency buffer (typically 10-15%) on top to cover unexpected costs. This calculator does that math for you: enter your per-night and per-day rates, trip length and traveler count, and it totals the subtotal, adds the buffer, and shows the grand total plus per-person and per-day figures.

Most travel-planning guidance suggests a 10-15% buffer on top of your planned subtotal, with a broader reasonable range of 5-20% depending on destination volatility and your risk tolerance. International or multi-country trips with more moving parts (visas, connections, currency swings) tend toward the higher end; a short, well-planned domestic trip can often use a smaller buffer.

A per-traveler cost is charged once for each person on the trip (e.g. a flight fare, a meal, an insurance premium) and is multiplied by the number of travelers. A shared cost is a single group total that doesn't scale with headcount (e.g. one hotel room, one rental car). Each category in this calculator has its own split toggle so you can mark accommodation as shared while keeping food per-traveler, for example.

The standard convention is nights = days - 1, since the last day of a trip typically has no further overnight stay (a 5-day trip has 4 nights). Nights is still its own editable field, though, so you can adjust it for edge cases like an overnight flight, a day trip with no lodging, or a trip that starts and ends on the same night.

No — it assumes every input is entered in a single currency for one calculation. Choose your currency from the selector to format the results correctly, but you should enter all cost figures (accommodation, food, flights, etc.) in that same currency; the calculator does not perform exchange-rate conversion between mixed-currency inputs.

Yes — travel and medical insurance is a standard line item in most official trip-planning guidance, since many home-country health plans and government services don't cover costs incurred abroad. This calculator includes a dedicated insurance field, defaulted to a per-traveler cost, so it's factored into your subtotal and contingency the same as any other category.

Set the number of travelers, mark each cost category as per-traveler or shared based on how it's actually being paid for, and the calculator's perPerson figure shows the total budget divided evenly across the group. For costs that aren't split evenly in real life (e.g. one person books the flights for everyone), you may need to adjust manually outside the calculator.

Visa and entry fees, travel insurance, local transport at the destination (taxis, transit passes, tolls), tips, and a general miscellaneous buffer for gifts, gear or parking are the categories travelers most often underestimate or skip. This calculator gives each of those its own field, and the contingency percentage exists specifically to catch anything still missed.

10% is a reasonable starting point for a well-planned trip, but many travelers budget 15-20% for international travel involving multiple countries, currency exchange, longer itineraries, or destinations with less predictable pricing. Raise the contingency percentage in the calculator if your trip has more uncertainty than a typical domestic getaway.

It's a solid planning baseline, but actual spending varies with booking timing, seasonal pricing, exchange-rate movement, and personal choices made during the trip. The contingency buffer exists precisely to absorb that variance — treat the total as a target to book toward and a buffer to have available, not a guaranteed final cost.

You can enter blended average rates (e.g. an average nightly accommodation cost across all cities) for a rough single estimate, but for a trip with very different costs per leg (a cheap countryside stretch plus an expensive capital-city stretch), it's more accurate to run this calculator separately for each leg and add the totals together.

The contingency buffer represents money you should have available, not money you're guaranteed to spend — so it's included in totalBudget, perPerson and perDay to reflect what you should actually plan and save for. The subtotal figure is still shown separately so you can see your baseline planned cost before the buffer.