The costs of having children

The pram costs more than a decent second-hand car, and the car seat isn't far behind. Then someone mentions that long day care in your suburb runs to $140 a day, and you do the maths twice, hoping you've read it wrong.

The biggest expense usually has no price tag attached at all. It's the income that stops arriving when one parent takes time off work, and the superannuation that stops building along with it. Prams and cots are one-off purchases you can borrow, buy second-hand or receive as gifts. A year of reduced income is much harder to hand down.

Less Googling,

more finding.

Search childcare near you.

How much does it cost to have a child in Australia?

The cost of having a child in Australia falls into three stages: the setup costs before the birth, the drop in household income during parental leave, and the ongoing weekly costs once your little one arrives. The third stage is the one that lasts, and it grows as your child does.

The most recent government budget-standards research comes from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, which put the weekly cost of raising a primary-school-aged child at $140 for families relying on income support and $170 for low-paid families. Those figures were published in 2018 and describe a minimum healthy-living standard, so they're a floor rather than a forecast. Living costs have risen a long way since.

None of this has stopped Australians having babies. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded 292,318 births registered in 2024, with the median age of mothers sitting at 32.1 years.

Before the baby arrives

1. Have the money conversation early

Money is tied up with values, which is why couples who work out their differences before the baby arrives spend far less energy arguing about them afterwards. The questions worth getting on the table:

Who takes leave, and for how long? One parent taking six months and the other taking four weeks is a completely different budget to splitting the year evenly.
Will the working partner top up the other's super? This costs less than most people assume and there's a tax offset attached.
What are you expecting to spend on schooling? Public, Catholic and independent schooling produce wildly different eighteen-year numbers, and it's easier to agree on this now than in Year 6.
Whose name do the savings sit in? Joint accounts, separate accounts and a mix all work. Choosing on purpose beats defaulting.

2. Work out the leave gap, not a round number

Saving "about ten grand" is a guess. Working out the gap is a plan.

Parental Leave Pay is paid at a flat weekly rate regardless of what you earned before, so the sum is straightforward. Subtract the Parental Leave Pay rate from your usual weekly take-home pay, then multiply that difference by the number of weeks you're planning to be off. Add anything your employer pays on top, and add the weeks that fall outside the government scheme entirely. The number you're left with is your savings target.

Open the account early and set the transfer to run automatically. Compound interest rewards the boring approach, and a savings account opened before the pregnancy vitamins has a long head start on one opened in the third trimester.

3. Build the post-baby budget before you need it

Household income usually falls and expenses usually rise, so the pre-baby budget stops being useful fairly quickly. Build the new one while you still have the sleep to do it properly. ASIC's Moneysmart budget planner is free and takes about twenty minutes.

On the spending side, newborns need far less than the shopping lists suggest. A safe place to sleep and a way to travel, meaning a pram and an approved car seat, cover the first fortnight. Everything else can wait until you know what your baby is like. Second-hand marketplaces and local buy-swap-sell groups handle most of the rest, and gifts fill more gaps than first-time parents expect.

One small piece of admin worth doing now: unsubscribe from retail marketing emails. You'll be holding your phone at 3am for months, and online shopping at 3am is expensive.

After the baby arrives

4. Keep super moving while you're on leave

Superannuation is where time out of the workforce does its least visible damage, and the gap compounds for decades. The Australian Government's Status of Women Report Card put the superannuation gap between women and men at 21.3% in 2021 to 2022, narrowed from 24.6% in 2014 to 2015.

Two things help, and one of them now happens automatically.

Super on Parental Leave Pay. For children born or adopted from 1 July 2025, the ATO pays a 12% superannuation contribution on top of Parental Leave Pay, paid straight into your fund after the end of the financial year. Payments started flowing from July 2026. You don't need to claim it, though it's worth checking that your name and address match across the ATO, Services Australia and your super fund.

Spouse contributions. If one partner earns under $40,000 in a financial year, which is common during a leave year, the other partner can put after-tax money into their super and claim a tax offset. The maximum offset is $540, calculated as 18% of the first $3,000 contributed, with the full amount available where the receiving partner's income is $37,000 or less. Conditions apply, and the ATO's guidance on spouse super contributions sets out all of them.

5. Make the saving automatic

Once you have children, you're permanently saving for something, and it helps to name what that something is. The families who manage this well decide what the money is for before they start saving it, then automate the transfer so the decision only has to be made once. Separate accounts named after their goals keep the progress visible, and a small weekly transfer into an account in a child's name adds up to something meaningful by the time they're old enough to want it.

Less Googling,

more finding.

Search childcare near you.

Government payments that reduce the cost

Several payments do real work on the household budget, and eligibility rules changed recently.

Parental Leave Pay. For children born or adopted from 1 July 2026, families get 130 days, or 26 weeks based on a five-day week. If you have a partner when you claim, 20 days are reserved for them. Services Australia sets the rate at $1,004.70 a week before tax from 1 July 2026, the same for everyone regardless of previous earnings. The Paid Parental Leave scheme changes page covers the transition rules for pre-birth claims.
Paid Parental Leave Superannuation Contribution. 12% of your Parental Leave Pay, paid by the ATO into your super fund, for children born or adopted from 1 July 2025.
Child Care Subsidy. From 6 July 2026, the Department of Education set the maximum 90% rate for families earning up to $88,520, tapering by one percentage point for every $5,000 above that and reaching zero at $538,520. The subsidy applies to your provider's hourly fee or the hourly rate cap, whichever is lower, and that cap is $15.19 an hour for centre-based day care for children below school age. Care for Kids' Child Care Subsidy calculator will give you a personalised estimate, and the guide to what the Child Care Subsidy covers explains how the percentage is worked out.
The 3 Day Guarantee. Since 5 January 2026, every CCS-eligible family gets at least 72 subsidised hours a fortnight, or three days a week, regardless of work or study. The old activity test is gone. Families doing more than 48 hours of recognised participation a fortnight can still access 100 hours, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are eligible for 100 hours.

Fees vary enormously by provider and postcode, so it's worth checking average daily fees by care type before you build childcare into a budget.

Your pre-baby money checklist

Agree on leave length and who takes it
Calculate the leave gap and set the weekly transfer
Open the savings account before the first scan
Rebuild the household budget on the lower income
Check Parental Leave Pay eligibility with Services Australia
Sort out spouse super contributions for the leave year
Buy the sleep space and the car seat, borrow or wait on the rest
Unsubscribe from the shopping emails

Money worries are normal, and they pass

Almost every parent has sat down with a calculator at some point and wondered how the numbers are going to work. Most of the time they do, partly because household spending adjusts faster than you expect and partly because the support available now is more generous than it was five years ago.

The families who feel most in control tend to be the ones who worked out the gap early, automated the saving and checked what they were entitled to instead of guessing. If childcare is the number keeping you up at night, practical ways to bring the cost down is a good place to start.

Originally contributed by Irit Harris, founder of Project Generation. Updated for 2026 by the Care for Kids editorial team.

Disclaimer: Everything above is general information rather than financial advice, so for anything specific to your circumstances, a licensed financial adviser is the right person to talk to.