The rule everyone quotes
A dollar per year of age, per week. A six-year-old gets $6, a ten-year-old gets $10. It is the most repeated allowance advice there is, and it is popular for good reasons: it takes ten seconds to explain, it visibly scales as they grow, and it survives the sibling argument because the rule is the same for everyone.
It also breaks in two directions at once.
At the young end it gives a four-year-old $4 a week, which is more money than a four-year-old has any use for — they cannot count it, cannot hold a plan for it, and will convert it into gum within an hour. At the older end it quietly commits you to real money: $12 a week for a twelve-year-old is over $600 a year, which is a household budget line, not pocket change.
The deeper problem is that it answers the wrong question. It tells you a number without ever asking what the money is for.
Start from the job, not the age
The useful question is: what is this money supposed to cover? Once you answer that, the amount mostly picks itself. There are three common tiers, and you are choosing between them rather than between dollar amounts.
- Treat money. The child buys small, immediate things — a freezie, a sticker pack, a hot chocolate. You still buy everything that matters. This is the right tier for most children under about seven, because the entire lesson at that age is "money is finite and spending it means it is gone".
- Treat money plus saving. Enough that a two-week wait buys something noticeably better than a one-week spend. This is where a savings goal starts to work, because the child can now feel the difference between spending and waiting.
- You buy your own X. You name a category — outings with friends, video game credits, gifts for other kids — and hand over both the budget and the decisions. This is the tier where allowance stops being a lesson and becomes practice.
The jump from tier two to tier three is the one worth planning. It usually costs more money and buys much better learning, because for the first time the child can run out of something they actually care about.
A table to start from
Starting points, not gospel. These are ranges families commonly land on; the right number for your house depends on what you have decided the money covers, what your neighbours do (children compare), and what you can pay every single week without resenting it.
| Age | Weekly range | What it usually covers |
|---|---|---|
| 4–5 | $1–3 | One small treat. The point is the ritual, not the amount. |
| 6–7 | $3–5 | Treats, plus enough to make saving for two weeks feel worth it. |
| 8–9 | $5–10 | Treats, small toys, and the first real "I am saving for that". |
| 10–12 | $10–20 | A named category they now own — outings, gifts, or game credits. |
Weekly or monthly?
Weekly, until they are about nine or ten.
A month is not a real unit of time to a six-year-old. If the money arrives monthly, the gap between the mistake and the consequence is so long that the two never connect — they blow it in a day and then experience four weeks of undifferentiated waiting that teaches nothing. A week is short enough that a bad decision on Saturday is still recognisably a bad decision by the following Friday.
Somewhere around ten, monthly starts to be the better teacher, because budgeting across a longer horizon is the actual skill you are now building. Moving from weekly to monthly is a genuine promotion, and worth framing as one.
The mistake that undoes everything
Changing the number mid-week.
Topping them up because they came up short for something they wanted, docking them because of an unrelated argument, advancing next week to end a scene in a shop — each one is reasonable in the moment, and together they teach the only lesson that really sticks: the number is negotiable if you push. Once a child believes that, no amount is ever enough, because the amount is no longer the point. The negotiation is.
Set the rate on a Sunday. Pay it on the same day every week. Change it on a birthday, or at a moment you have decided in advance and announced — never in the middle of a disagreement.
If you pay per job instead
Plenty of families skip a fixed allowance entirely and pay per job. That is a legitimate model with different tradeoffs, and it is worth reading whether to pay for chores at all before committing to it.
If you do go per-job, the number you actually need is not the weekly total — it is what one job is worth. Pick that, and everything else follows: a $200 bike stops being an abstraction and becomes 200 garbage days. Our chore-cost calculator does that conversion for any price, which is the single fastest way we have found to make a child understand what something costs.