How much does it cost to raise a child to age 17 in the U.S.?

How to get close to this number

Multiply annual cost by years. A child adds somewhere around fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year to a middle-income household budget, and the estimate runs to age seventeen. Annual cost times eighteen years gives a figure in the low hundreds of thousands.

The composition in the explanation is the useful breakdown: housing is the largest single component, followed by food and childcare. Most of the cost of a child is not things bought for the child — it is a larger home, and someone to look after them while parents work. Direct spending on the child is a minority of the total.

Two caveats change the number substantially. The estimate stops before college, which for many families is the single largest expense; and cost per child falls noticeably as families get larger, because housing and many other costs are shared. A per-child figure derived from a one-child household overstates the marginal cost of a second.