Reviewed by the Penny Time editorial team

Part of our Allowance hub.

Average Allowance by Age: How Much to Give (and Whether to Tie It to Chores)

The most common rule parents use is simple: pay about $1 per week for each year of your child's age. A 6-year-old gets $6, a 10-year-old gets $10, a 14-year-old gets $14. It is a starting point, not a law, but it lines up closely with what surveys actually find families doing.

The 2023 T. Rowe Price Parents, Kids and Money Survey reported that kids who get an allowance receive about $10 to $15 a week on average, with the number climbing steadily by age. RoosterMoney (now part of NatWest) tracked its app users and found average weekly allowances rising from a few dollars for young children to well over $15 for teens. The dollar-per-year guideline sits right in the middle of those ranges, which is why it has stuck around.

Average allowance by age

Here is a practical age-by-age guide that blends the dollar-per-year rule with published survey ranges. Treat these as anchors, then adjust for your budget and what the money is expected to cover.

If you want a number tailored to your child rather than a chart, our allowance calculator takes an age and adjusts for your household. It is the interactive version of the table above.

Should allowance be tied to chores?

This is the question that splits parents, and it is worth getting right because the research is more one-sided than most people expect. Parents who ask for evidence, the kind of crowd you find in communities like r/ScienceBasedParenting, tend to land on the same conclusion once they read it.

Financial educators generally recommend separating basic chores from allowance. The reasoning: some jobs are simply part of being in a family. Making your bed, clearing your plate, and keeping your room livable are contributions everyone makes, not paid labor. When you pay for those, children learn they can opt out by refusing the money, and the family-contribution lesson quietly disappears.

There is also a well-documented psychology angle. Research on motivation, popularized in Dan Ariely's work on how markets and social norms mix, shows that adding a small payment to a task people would do for free can actually reduce their willingness to do it. Once a chore becomes a transaction, the internal reason to help fades and the price becomes the only thing that matters. A few dollars rarely competes with the pull of doing something else.

What the evidence-minded approach looks like

Most researchers and financial-literacy programs suggest a middle path rather than a strict all-or-nothing rule:

• Baseline chores are unpaid. These are the everyday contributions expected of every family member, tied to belonging rather than pay.
• Allowance is a teaching tool, given on a schedule. Its job is to give kids real money to practice saving, spending, and making mistakes while the stakes are low.
• Extra, optional jobs can be paid. Washing the car, raking leaves, or a bigger project outside the normal routine is where earning-for-work fits naturally.

This structure teaches two lessons at once: money is something you manage, and work is something you can choose to do for pay. Children still learn that effort earns money through the optional jobs, without turning the whole household into a marketplace.

How to split the money once you decide the amount

The amount matters less than what your child does with it. A common and effective structure is the three-jar approach: save, spend, and give. Younger kids can start with two jars and add giving later.

Deciding how much to hold back for savings is a good early lesson. Our budget planner helps kids map allowance across categories, and the wants vs needs activity gives them a way to sort purchases before they spend. When a birthday or holiday drops a lump sum in their lap, the birthday money calculator turns that windfall into a save-spend-give plan too.

When to start and when to raise it

Most families start allowance between ages 5 and 7, when children can count money and understand that spending it now means it is gone. Consistency matters more than the exact starting age. Pick a payday, the same day each week, and keep it.

Raise the amount when responsibilities grow, not on a fixed calendar. A useful trigger is when your child starts covering a new category themselves, like buying their own snacks at school or handling gifts for friends. Tie the raise to the new responsibility so the bump has a reason your child can see.

A conversation to have this week

Numbers are the easy part. The lasting value comes from talking about money out loud, which most families rarely do. Sit down with your child and ask: "If you got $10 this week, how much would you save, how much would you spend, and would you give any away?" Then listen without correcting the first answer.

That single question does more than any chart. It turns allowance from a handout into a decision your child owns, and it opens the door to the kind of ongoing money talk that actually shapes how they handle it later.

Turn allowance into real money lessons

Penny Time turns allowance into playful Quests where kids make real money decisions and see how each one turns out. Parents stay in charge of every cash-out. Free for the whole family.

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