Budget allocation explorer
Drag five bands to split take-home pay between housing, food, transport, debt payments and saving. Whatever is left sits in everything else, so the six shares always total 100 percent. The illustrative starting split puts 30 percent in housing and 15 percent in saving, leaving 23 percent unassigned.
Saving rate
15%
of take-home pay. 23% is still unassigned, sitting in everything else.
Drag any of the five bands to resize it, or focus a dot and use the arrow keys. Everything else absorbs the change.
- Housing is at or below the 30 percent reference point and the saving rate is above zero.
The opening split is an illustrative example rather than a measured average. The 30 percent housing reference point is conventionally measured against gross pay, so read against take-home it is a tighter line than the convention it comes from.
In short
- Drag any of the five bands sideways to widen or narrow its share of take-home pay.
- Watch everything else shrink as another band grows, since the six shares always total 100 percent.
- Focus a dot and press the arrow keys to move a share one percentage point at a time.
- Read the saving rate at the top, and reset the split when you want the starting numbers back.
Why the bands are shares, not amounts
Every band is a percentage of take-home pay, which is what lands in the account after tax and payroll deductions. A share travels between incomes in a way an amount does not: two people on very different pay can compare a 28 percent housing band directly.
The last band, everything else, is the remainder rather than a category you choose. It covers whatever has not been named yet, it is a readout rather than a control, and it is what shrinks when any of the five bands grows. When it reaches zero, a band can only grow by taking from another band, which is the constraint a real budget runs into.
What the saving rate tells you
The saving rate is the share of take-home pay that is not spent. It sits at the top because it is the number that moves the long-run outcome most: it sets both how fast a balance grows and how much spending that balance eventually has to cover.
A saving rate of zero means the whole of take-home is committed, so any gap between income and a bill has to be met by borrowing or by cutting another band. General guidance treats an emergency fund as the first claim on this band, because money that may be needed at short notice cannot sit anywhere its value might be down on the day it is called for.
The 30 percent housing mark measures gross pay
The tool flags housing above 30 percent, and that figure needs one correction before it means anything here. The 30 percent housing reference point comes from housing policy, where cost burden is measured against gross pay, before tax and deductions. Every band on this page is a share of take-home instead. Take-home is the smaller number, so 30 percent of it is less money than 30 percent of gross, and the same 30 is a tighter line here than in the convention it borrows from. Take an illustrative case where deductions remove a quarter of gross pay: 30 percent of take-home is then 22.5 percent of gross, which sits well inside the benchmark rather than past it.
So read the flag as an observation about the shape of the split, not as a verdict on it. It comes from policy convention rather than from any calculation about your own position. Housing above 30 percent means less room in the other five bands, so the trade-off shows up somewhere else, and a high housing band paired with a low transport band is a normal pattern for someone who lives close to work. The gross-pay version of the same test is the front-end ratio in the debt-to-income calculator, which measures the housing payment against gross monthly income the way a lender does.
Common questions
Why do the bands always add to 100 percent?
Because take-home pay is the whole of what can be allocated. Every percentage point added to one band has to come from somewhere, so the tool takes it from the unassigned remainder and stops when that remainder hits zero. No band can go negative.
Is the saving rate calculated before or after tax?
After. Every band here is a share of take-home pay, meaning what arrives in the account once tax and payroll deductions have gone. A saving rate measured against gross pay would look larger for the same money set aside, so the two are not comparable.
Why can I not drag the everything else band?
It is the remainder, so it has no value of its own to set. It is whatever the five named bands have not claimed, which is why it moves on its own as you drag the others and why it reaching zero is what stops a band growing.
Should debt payments count as saving?
They are separated here because they behave differently. Paying down a balance raises net worth just as saving does, but the money is not available afterwards, and the return is fixed at the loan rate rather than uncertain. Keeping them apart lets you see both shares at once.
Keep reading
This page is educational material, not financial advice. The figures come from the formula shown and assume the inputs you enter hold for the whole term. Your own rate, fees, taxes and timing will differ, so treat the output as arithmetic to check a decision against, not as a recommendation.