According to the recently released “Expenditures on Children by Families, 2015,” a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the annual cost to raise a single child increased by 3 percent from 2014 to 2015.
While the increase exceeds the government’s preferred measure of inflation, the consumer price index (or CPI), which only registered a 0.1 percent increase from 2014 to 2015, it fell short of the historical annual increase of annual child rearing expenses, which has averaged 4.3 percent since 1960.
For “middle income” families, households earning between $59,200 and $107,400 before taxes, estimated child-rearing expenses for one child in a two-child, two-parent family making ranged between $12,350 and $13,900 in 2015.
For lower-income families making less than $52,900, annual child-rearing expenses for a similarly structured family ranged between $9,330 and $9,980 in 2015. At the same time, higher-income families with before-tax income over $107,400, child-rearing expenses ranged from $19,380 to $23,380.
Among those three family-income levels, the lower third spends around 27 percent of their pre-tax dollars on raising a child, the middle third spends around 16 percent, and the highest third spends 11 percent; however, the USDA notes that the range among the percentages would narrow if after-tax income were considered.
The estimated expense to raise a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610 in 2015 dollars for a middle-income, two-child family headed by a married couple.
Housing costs account for the largest share of child-rearing expenses across income groups in 2015, comprising between 26 percent and 33 percent of the total expenses for rearing a child in a two-child family headed by married parents. For families in the middle-income group, food and child care/educational expenses were the next largest average expenditures, with food accounting for 18 percent of the child-rearing costs and education/care accounting for 16 percent.
The USDA says that its estimates may vary considerably by household income level, region, and household composition, thus a single estimate may not apply to all families.
For example, geography plays a role in how much families spend to raise their children – married-couple families in the northeastern U.S. had the highest child-rearing expenses in 2015, according to the USDA, followed by similar families in the urban west and the urban south. Married-couple families in the Midwest and in rural areas had the lowest child-rearing expenses.
The number of children in the household also impacts expenditures – married couples with only one child in the household had expenses that averaged 27 percent more per child than those of two-child households, and per-child expenditures in households with three or more children averaged 24 percent less per child in 2015.