Here’s how much it costs to raise a child in every state in 2026: Where you live can impact the bill by more than $200,000
Source: Fortune ·
LendingTree pegs the 18-year cost of raising a child above $300,000 for the first time, but where you live can swing the bill by more than $210,000.
From the source
Raising a child has long been called priceless. The bill, though, is getting harder to ignore. The cost of raising a child through age 18 in the U.S. now stands at $303,418, according to LendingTree’s latest annual analysis—the first time the estimate has topped $300,000 since the company began tracking it in 2023. That works out to about $16,857 a year, up 1.9% from $297,674 in the prior year’s report. Over a longer stretch, the climb is steeper: The 18-year total is up 27.8% from LendingTree’s first report. The latest figures, released in April and based mostly on 2024 data, actually reflect a slowdown from earlier jumps. Housing was the biggest driver this time: The extra rent households with children pay compared with households without them rose 48.9%, to $1,680 a year. Infant day care, meanwhile, fell 3.2%, to $17,264 a year—the only category to drop by more than a fraction of a percentage point. Still, LendingTree chief consumer finance analyst Matt Schulz told Fortune that…