How to actually think about the cost of a child
The tool on the home page does real arithmetic, but arithmetic is only honest if the numbers going into it are. Most people who run a cost-of-a-child calculation get a reassuring answer because they quietly entered reassuring inputs. This page is about entering the real ones.
Childcare is the line almost everyone lowballs
The single biggest recurring cost in the early years usually isn't diapers, clothes, or food — it's paid childcare, if both adults work. In much of the US, full-time infant daycare runs comparable to rent, and in expensive metros it can exceed it. The mistake isn't ignorance; it's optimism. People enter a number from memory, or a national average, instead of looking up two or three actual local providers and using what they actually charge.
To orient you — and only to orient you — recent national figures put center-based infant care at very roughly $1,200–$1,300 a month on average, but the spread across the country is enormous: under $600 a month in the cheapest states, and over $1,900 a month in the most expensive places like Washington, D.C. In-home or family daycare typically runs meaningfully cheaper than a center, often on the order of 20–30% less. A useful sanity check from federal guidance: childcare is considered "affordable" only if it stays at or below about 7% of household income — a bar that, for infant care, essentially no state currently meets. If the number you're about to enter is well under 7% of your income, it is worth asking whether it reflects real local rates or hope.
Treat those figures as a yardstick, not an input. Costs vary by state, county, the child's age (infant care is the most expensive and falls as they get older), and care type, and they move year to year. Before you trust any result, do the actual thing: find real local rates for the kind of care you'd realistically use, and enter that. If the honest number changes the answer, that is the calculator working, not failing.
The costs that aren't childcare
Childcare dominates the early years, but it isn't the whole picture, and the other costs are easy to wave away one at a time. Health insurance usually rises when you add a dependent. Housing often expands — not always immediately, but the pressure toward more space is real and is a recurring cost, not a one-time one. There are the unglamorous ongoing lines: food, clothing that is outgrown on a schedule, activities, and the steady background spend that doesn't feel like much in any single month and adds up across years. None of these individually changes the decision. Entered honestly and together, they change the monthly figure — which is the only figure the arithmetic can speak to.
The tool keeps this deliberately simple: one "added monthly cost" line rather than a false-precision breakdown. That is honest about what can actually be known in advance. It does mean the burden is on you to make that one number reflect the real total, not just the daycare invoice.
Lost income is a cost, even when no one writes a cheque
The tool asks for "monthly income you'd lose to caregiving." This is the cost people most often enter as zero, because it doesn't arrive as a bill. It shows up as reduced hours, a career pause, a slower trajectory, declined opportunities, or a move to lower-paid but more flexible work — for whichever partner takes that on. It is real money, and over years it frequently outweighs the direct cost of the child.
It is also the cost most likely to be unevenly distributed and least likely to be discussed plainly in advance. Whoever steps back rarely steps back to exactly zero and rarely steps back for only a few months; the effect on earning trajectory can outlast the years of paid childcare entirely. You don't have to predict it precisely. But entering zero only makes sense if you genuinely expect no change to anyone's earning — and that is rarer than people assume when they fill these tools in hopefully. If you're not sure, a deliberately conservative estimate is more honest than zero.
What the opportunity-cost figure is — and what it absolutely is not
The result shows what the same monthly amount would become if invested instead at a flat illustrative rate. People sometimes read this as the tool saying a child is a bad investment. It is not saying that, and it cannot, because the figure deliberately ignores everything a child is actually for. It is there for one narrow purpose: scale. Large recurring costs compound, and seeing the compounded number stops the monthly figure from feeling smaller than it is. Read it as a unit conversion, not a verdict.
It is also why the figure uses a flat, clearly-labelled rate and no inflation or real-world cost curves. A more elaborate model would look more authoritative and be less honest — it would imply a precision about decades of compounding, market returns, and your own earning that nobody has. The plain version is the trustworthy one precisely because it doesn't pretend.
Why there's no regret score anywhere on this site
You will not find a "regret probability" or a recommendation here, and that is deliberate. Whether to have a child is one of the few decisions where the honest answer to "what does the data say?" is that the data doesn't say. A tool that hands you a confident percentage on that question has invented it. This one does arithmetic where arithmetic applies and stops where it stops — which is the only version worth trusting with a decision this size.