Tools · 4 min read
Daily travel budget calculator
Work out what you can spend per day from your total budget, trip length and fixed costs. Adjust the numbers and see the daily allowance update as you type.
Move the sliders. The number on the right is what you can spend per day once your fixed costs are out and a buffer is held back. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
The calculator
Your trip
Everything you are willing to spend, start to finish.
Count the travel days at both ends.
Flights, pre-booked stays, visas, insurance, passes.
Held back for the things that go wrong. 15 to 20 percent is sensible.
Spend per day
$158
After fixed costs and a 15% buffer, across 14 days.
- Variable pool
- $2,600
- Buffer held back
- $390
- Per day without buffer
- $186
- Fixed costs share
- 35% of budget
Nothing you type here is sent anywhere. It is arithmetic running in your browser.
How it works out the number
The arithmetic is deliberately simple, because a complicated model would not be more true:
- Total budget minus fixed costs gives the variable pool.
- The buffer percentage is taken out of that pool and set aside.
- What remains is divided by the number of days.
The two decisions that actually matter are which costs you count as fixed, and whether you are honest about the buffer. Everything else is division.
Getting the inputs right
Total budget
What you are genuinely willing to spend, not what you hope to spend. If there is a number above which you would be upset, that is the number.
Days away
Count both travel days. They are real days with real costs, usually higher ones: airport food, an early taxi, a bag fee you had forgotten about.
Fixed costs
Anything already committed and unchangeable by decisions on the ground. Flights, prepaid accommodation, visas, insurance, rail passes, deposits. If skipping lunch cannot change it, it is fixed.
Accommodation is the one people get wrong. Booked in advance it is fixed. Booked as you go it is variable and belongs in the daily number, which will make that number much larger and is correct.
Buffer
Fifteen to twenty percent. Below ten and one bad day breaks the plan. The buffer is not for a nicer dinner, it is for the pharmacy, the cancelled bus, the replacement charger, the night you had to book somewhere at short notice.
What the number is not
It is not a prediction, and no calculator can give you one. It is a target derived from what you have decided to spend. Whether it is achievable is a separate question, and the only way to answer it is from the bottom up: price a real night in a real place for your real dates, price a day of eating the way you actually eat, add local transport, add one activity every two or three days.
If the bottom-up figure comes out higher than the calculator's, the honest options are more money, fewer days, or a cheaper style of trip. That is worth finding out now. The full method is in the budgeting guide.
It is also not a fixed daily cap. Real trips are lumpy: cheap bus days and expensive dive days. What matters is the running total against the trip, which is why Tasca carries unspent allowance forward instead of resetting to zero every midnight.
Questions
How do you calculate a daily travel budget?
Take your total trip budget, subtract the fixed costs you have already committed to such as flights and pre-booked accommodation, hold back 15 to 20 percent as a buffer, then divide what is left by the number of days you will be away.
Should the daily budget include accommodation?
Only if you are booking it as you go. Accommodation paid in advance is a fixed cost and belongs outside the daily number, otherwise the day you paid it looks catastrophic and every other day looks cheap.
Is $100 a day enough for travel?
It depends entirely on where. In much of Southeast Asia, Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe it is comfortable. In Japan, Western Europe, Australia or the Nordics it is tight unless you are staying in hostels and cooking. Price your own accommodation and food for the dates you are actually going rather than trusting a global figure.