Safety net
Emergency fund calculator
The usual advice is three to six months of expenses. That is right, but only if you size it off the essentials — the bills that do not stop when the income does. Sizing it off total spending inflates the target by a third and discourages the person who most needs the fund.
Your position
Changes the symbol on your figures. It does not convert them — there is no exchange rate here.
Rent or mortgage, food, utilities, insurance, transport, minimum debt payments. Not holidays or restaurants.
Leave at zero if you are not adding to it yet.
Three if your income is stable and salaried. Six or more if it is variable, or if you are the only earner.
Your target
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Still to save
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Months covered today
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Full at this rate
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This calculator needs JavaScript to recalculate. The figures above are a worked example, and every assumption behind them is written out below.
What this assumes
The target is essential outgoings only. In a month with no income the holidays and the restaurants stop on their own, and funding them is what makes the target look impossible.
No interest is assumed on the fund itself. It should be somewhere you can reach in a day, which usually means somewhere paying very little — and a fund that is invested is not an emergency fund, because emergencies and market falls arrive together.
What counts as essential
In
- Rent or mortgage
- Groceries
- Utilities
- Insurance
- Transport to work
- Minimum debt payments
- Childcare
- Phone
Out
- Restaurants
- Holidays
- Subscriptions you would cancel
- Clothes
- Gym
- Extra debt payments
- Investing
The line is not “could I live without this” but “would I still be paying this in the month I lost my job”. Minimum debt payments are in. Anything above the minimum is out, because you would pause it.
Three months or six?
The honest answer depends on how long it would take you to replace your income, not on a rule. Three months is reasonable for a salaried role in a field that is hiring. Six is the sensible default. Nine to twelve makes sense if you are self-employed, on commission, the only earner in a household, or in a specialised role where the next job takes a while to find.
If you are in a country where losing your job also means losing your health insurance, size upward.
Build it before you invest, and before you overpay debt
An emergency fund is the thing that stops an unexpected bill becoming credit card debt at 22%. Without one, a boiler failure undoes a year of overpayments. The usual sequence is: a small starter fund, then any debt above roughly 8–10% interest, then the full fund, then investing.
Common questions
Should my emergency fund be invested?
Should I build the fund or pay off debt first?
Does a mortgage payment count as essential?
What if I cannot get anywhere near three months?
The app this comes from
The hard input here is the first one
Almost nobody knows their essential monthly outgoings to within a few hundred, because essentials and everything else arrive on the same statement. Separating them is exactly what a spending log is for.
Not out yet. TLDR Money International is in build for the United States and the United Kingdom first, on iPhone and Android. There is nothing to download and nothing to sign up to — when there is, this page will say so.
Last reviewed 20 August 2026. The arithmetic behind this page is covered by automated tests that run on every deploy.