A month's shared bills, priced five ways for a house of several households
A house where a grandparent, an adult child or a sibling's family has moved in has one set of bills and several households inside it. Five ways to split one month's shared bills, side by side, with each person's figure and the working: per head, per share with children counted at a fraction the family sets, per household unit, by income, and by rooms. What is usually at stake is not any one of those figures but the gap between them, and this page prints that gap for every household in the house. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
The one claim this page makes, in the words it is permitted: Splits a month's shared grocery and utility bills across the people in the house by the method you choose, with each share and the working shown. This page is arithmetic on four bills you type: groceries; utilities, meaning electricity, gas and water; the internet and a shared phone line; and household supplies. Care costs - medication, aides, equipment - are not a line item here.It is not a tax calculation. It makes no judgment about how a household ought to divide its bills, and it is not advice of any kind. Residents are counted here and never named; the roster uses roles.
The walkthrough is on. Each part says what its figures mean and where to find them. Turn it off at the top once you know your way around. The figures in the blanks are a worked example so the page shows a real result before you touch it; replace them with yours.
The month's shared bills, added up$1,385.00
People in the house6 people
Household units they live in2 units
Each head, with every resident counted as one$230.83
Each unit, with every household counted as one$692.50
The widest gap one unit sees between two of the five methods$273.38
A
The month's shared bills
The four bills this page divides, as they fall this month. Read them off the bill or the statement. Anything that is not on these four lines is in no figure on this page.
Groceries
What the house spent on food and drink that everybody eats. A parcel that is one person's own is not a shared bill and this page has nowhere to put it.
Utilities, internet and supplies
Electricity, gas and water on one line; the internet and a shared phone line on the next; cleaning things, bin bags, bulbs and the like on the third. Four lines, one month, nothing else.
Groceries
Utilities electricity, gas, water
Internet and the shared phone line
Household supplies
Only have one total? Put your month's total for these four lines in the groceries box and leave the other three at $0 — all five methods split the month's total, so every figure below is the one the four-line breakdown would give; check first that the total covers groceries, utilities, internet and household supplies only, with no care costs in it.
B
Who lives here, and in which household
One card for each person who lives here, counted by role and not by name. A household unit is the group whose money is one pot: a couple, a grandparent on their own, a sibling's family. Rooms are typed once for each unit, on the first card that unit has.
Household unit
Give every person a unit number, up to six units in one house. Two people in one unit are one payer with one figure between them, and two units in one house are two payers.
Adult or child
A child counts as a fraction of a share in the share method and as a whole head in the others. Nothing here decides who is a child; the roster does.
Rooms
How many rooms the unit occupies, in halves where a room is shared. The bill payer knows the house, so this one is yours.
Monthly income
Income is the resident's own figure and not the bill payer's to guess. Leave a box blank until you have it and the income column reads income waiting in every household and resident row, rather than printing a figure worked from the boxes that are in; type a zero for anybody with none of their own.
C
What a child counts as
The fraction of a share a child counts as in the share method. It is the family's choice and this page has no view on it; set it where the family set it. A whole share makes that method the head method again, and nothing makes it a recommendation.
A child counts as of one share, in steps of 0.05
D
What each method divides by
What each method counts, and the month divided by it. Every line is computed from the figures printed beside it; money is worked to the cent and a count of people is whole. A dash is a method with nothing to divide by, and the note beside it says which figure is missing.
E
The five methods, side by side
One row for each household unit, with its residents listed beneath it, and one column for each of the five methods. The gap column is the gap between that row's own widest and narrowest figure. The share-of-the-month column is printed on the household-unit rows only: a resident's own row and the All units row carry a dash there, because a share of the month is a figure this page gives a household unit rather than a person, and not because anything is missing from your entry. A household unit's own row carries a dash there too wherever the four bill lines come to nothing, because with no month typed there is nothing for a row to be a share of. A gap is taken across however many methods have a figure at that state, which is five where every column is live and as few as two where columns are dashed; on the All units row it is the gap between the column footings themselves, which is $0.00 wherever each one foots to the whole month. The widest gap any single unit sees is the figure at the top of the page.
Household
Per head
Per share
Per unit
By income
By rooms
Gap
Share of the month
Unit 1
$923.33
$831.00
$692.50
$965.88
$831.00
$273.38
50.0% to 69.7%
Adult 1
$230.83
$277.00
$173.13
$551.93
$207.75
$378.80
—
Adult 2
$230.83
$277.00
$173.13
$413.95
$207.75
$240.82
—
Child 1
$230.83
$138.50
$173.13
$0.00
$207.75
$230.83
—
Child 2
$230.83
$138.50
$173.13
$0.00
$207.75
$230.83
—
Unit 2
$461.67
$554.00
$692.50
$419.12
$554.00
$273.38
30.3% to 50.0%
Adult 3
$230.83
$277.00
$346.25
$250.09
$277.00
$115.42
—
Adult 4
$230.83
$277.00
$346.25
$169.03
$277.00
$177.22
—
All units
$1,385.00
$1,385.00
$1,385.00
$1,385.00
$1,385.00
$0.00
—
The same arithmetic, written out for anything reading this page rather than looking at it: api.json beside this page carries every input, every output, the formula written out, this worked example, and a list of what the calculation leaves out.
F
Words that come up
Shared bill
One of the four lines this page divides: groceries, utilities, the internet and a shared phone line, household supplies. Care costs are not among them.
Household unit
The group inside the house whose money is one pot. A unit can be one person or a family of five.
Head
One resident, counted as one whole person, child or adult.
Share
One adult counts as one share and a child counts as the fraction the family set. The share method divides the month by the shares counted.
Gap
The difference between the widest and the narrowest of one row's figures, counting however many methods have a figure: five where every column is live, and as few as two where columns are dashed. It is what the choice of method is worth to that row in a month — to a household unit on its own row, to one resident on theirs, and on the All units row to the column footings themselves.
Share of the month
A unit's figure as a part of the month's four bills, printed to a tenth of a percent. A household unit's own row prints a pair of percentages there, the narrowest of the figures that unit has and the widest, as parts of the month; it prints one percentage on its own wherever those two readings come out at the same tenth of a percent, which is every house of one person with a month typed, every unit whose five figures are one figure repeated, and any unit whose widest and narrowest figures sit close enough together to read the same at a tenth — so a unit can print one percentage beside a gap of a few cents, and the gap column beside it is the figure that says how far apart the two readings really are. Resident rows and the All units row carry a dash there for the reasons in this list's dash entry.
Rooms
The rooms a unit occupies, typed in halves. The rooms method divides the month by the rooms counted.
A dash
A column with nothing to divide by; or, in the methods table, the share-of-the-month column on a row that is not a household unit, because that figure is a unit's rather than a person's; or that same column on a household unit's own row wherever the four bill lines come to nothing, because then there is no month for the row to be a share of. A dash is not a zero. In the methods table a column still waiting on a box nobody has filled in is not a dash either: the income column there reads income waiting in every household and resident row while a box is blank, and only its footing on the All units row is a dash. In part D, where each method's divisor is listed, a dash is a divisor this page has not got, with the reason printed beside it.
The figures print with it. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is saved except whether the walkthrough is on.
The ledger this page does not keep
This page prices one month and forgets it when you close the tab. What it cannot do is keep the running account of who paid which bill and who is owed what in April, because that answer is a year of your own months and a single page holds none of them.
The kit is two files, for one price, yours to keep:
A workbook with the formulas left in - every bill on one row: the month, which of the lines it is, shared or one household's own, who paid, and the method its weights came from. Then what each household owes, what each has paid in, and the balance running down the rows. A summary adds it up by household and by month, and a check sheet works every one of those figures out a second way.
The rules and the decisions, as a short PDF - how each figure is defined, the five methods with the weight each one types, and the decisions the arithmetic cannot settle: what is shared, what is personal, the method, the child fraction, how a month with a big one-off is handled, who pays first and is reimbursed, and when it is all looked at again. Three awkward months are worked through with it: a one-off repair, a month somebody is away, and somebody moving in halfway through.
One payment, no subscription, no account on this site. A spreadsheet and a PDF; files, not software. Nothing on this page needs it, and the page stays free and complete without it.