Group trip cost calculator

Work out who owes who, across currencies

Add the people on the trip, then every expense with the currency it was actually paid in and who paid and shared it. Pick the currency you want to settle up in, and give the calculator the exchange rate for every other currency used — the rate you were actually charged, not today's rate. It converts each expense to the settlement currency first, then works out balances and the fewest payments to clear them.

How to do it by hand

The whole method is five steps, and the order of the first two is the part people get wrong.

1. Pick one settlement currency — the one you want the final answer in. It does not have to be the currency most of the trip was spent in.
2. Convert every expense to the settlement currency on its own, before anything else. Use the rate you were actually charged for that expense: the amount on your card statement divided by the amount on the receipt, or what the exchange desk gave you in cash. Do this expense by expense, not after adding a currency's expenses together, because a currency total can span days with different rates and there is no single honest rate left for the lump sum.
3. Split each converted expense among the people who shared it, in whole minor units. Divide the converted total by the number of sharers and round down; that leaves a few minor units over, and one goes to each of that many people, so the shares add up to the converted total exactly.
4. Give everybody one balance: everything they paid, converted, minus everything they owe, converted. Add all the balances up: they must come to exactly zero. If they do not, a conversion or a share was done after the total rather than before it, or a step of arithmetic is wrong.
5. Match the biggest debtor to the biggest creditor and move the smaller of the two amounts between them. That clears at least one of them completely. Cross them off and repeat with whoever is left.

Step 2 is the fix this page exists for. Converting a big netted currency total at whatever rate happens to apply on the day you settle up prices old spending at today's rate, which is not what anyone was actually charged, and the gap lands entirely on whoever fronted that currency. Converting expense by expense, at the rate that applied when it happened, avoids that regardless of how long the trip runs or how late you get around to settling up.

Worked example

Four people, three currencies, settling in pounds.

Trip total, all converted to pounds: £553.95.

£70.73 does not split four ways exactly: £17.68 × 4 is £70.72, a penny short, so that one extra penny goes to the first person on the sharer list — here, Ada. The same thing happens on the £44.51 ramen bill, which is a penny short three ways rather than one, so three of the four people take the extra penny and only Dev does not. Every row still sums exactly to its converted total.

£258.27 − £70.98 − £84.30 − £102.99 = £0.00. The four balances always sum to exactly zero, because every expense's shares sum to exactly that expense's converted total, whatever the rate did to the pennies. Settling in the fewest payments matches the biggest debtor to the biggest creditor each time: Dev pays Ada £102.99, then Cleo pays Ada £84.30, then Ben pays Ada £70.98 — three payments for four people, which is the fewest possible once three of them owe money.

Mistakes that quietly move money between people

• Netting across currencies. Never offset a yen debt against a euro credit at a made-up rate. Keep every expense's own currency in mind until it is deliberately converted, and convert it into one currency before comparing it with anything else — not by eye.
• Converting the settle-up total instead of each expense. A currency's running total can contain spending from the first day of the trip and the last, at different rates, so there is no single rate left that is fair to apply to the lump sum. Convert as each expense goes in.
• Using today's rate for a receipt from three weeks ago. Exchange rates move. The rate that matters is the one you were actually charged, which is fixed the moment the transaction clears, not whatever a live rate service says when you finally sit down to settle up.
• Accepting dynamic currency conversion at the terminal. When a card machine abroad offers to charge you in your home currency, decline it: that conversion is done by the merchant's payment provider at a worse rate than your own card network would give you, and it hides the actual foreign amount from the receipt.

For a single-currency bill, the bill split calculator and settling group debts in the fewest payments cover the same netting idea without the currency conversion step. The full discussion of which rate to use and why is in splitting expenses in different currencies, and the wider trip-planning context — deposits, sub-groups, chasing people afterwards — is in splitting costs on a group trip.

Where Splitright fits

We make one of the apps that does this, so read this section accordingly. This calculator is the right tool for totting up a trip after the fact; it is the wrong tool for a two-week trip with forty receipts in three currencies, because you would be retyping the whole list every time somebody buys a round.

Splitright is a free app for iPhone, iPad (iOS 16.4 and later) and Android (7.0 and later). There are no accounts, no ads, no subscription and no tracking: one person creates a group, shares a six-character code, and everyone with the code opens the same group from their own phone. Each expense supports 43 currencies with the correct number of decimal places for each one, and can be split equally, by weighted shares (2:1, 3:1 and so on) or by exact amounts. When an expense is entered in a currency other than the group's usual one, Splitright records the exchange rate at that moment and keeps it with the expense, then converts each expense at its own rate before netting — the same order this page's calculator uses. So the figures do not drift if you settle up weeks later, rather than today's rate being applied retroactively to old spending.

What it does not do: there is no receipt scanning, no CSV or PDF export and no categories, and it holds no market data of its own beyond the settle-up rate lookup. It does not move money — it gives you the amounts and you pay however you already do. It is not a backup. And the group code is the credential: anyone holding it can open and edit the group, there is no per-person login, and one person's access cannot be withdrawn, so treat it like a password.

• Download for iPhone
• Get it on Google Play
• See everything Splitright does

If you want automatic per-expense conversion in your pocket rather than typing rates into a calculator, that is exactly what the app is for — our comparison page says where other apps beat us too. Related: splitting expenses in different currencies and support.

Common questions

Is anything I type into this calculator sent anywhere?

No. The calculator is a few lines of JavaScript inside the page itself, so every expense, name and rate you type stays in your browser and is worked out on your own device. There is no analytics, no cookie, no advertising script and no request back to us carrying your numbers, and nothing you type is stored between visits. Close the tab and it is gone.

Why convert each expense before netting, instead of converting the final totals?

Because a currency bucket can hold expenses entered weeks apart, and by the time you settle up there is no single rate left that is honest for the whole bucket. Converting each expense to the settlement currency as it is entered, at the rate that applied then, keeps every figure tied to something that actually happened. Converting a big netted total at whatever rate happens to apply on settle-up day prices old spending at today's exchange rate, which nobody was actually charged.

How does the calculator make sure the shares always add up exactly?

Every expense is converted to a whole number of minor units (pennies, cents, or whole yen) in the settlement currency first. That converted total is then divided among the people sharing it using largest-remainder allocation: everyone gets the rounded-down share, and the leftover minor units go one each to as many people as there are units left, so the shares always sum to the converted total exactly. Balances are built only from these exact figures, so they always sum to exactly zero.

What does the fewest-payments settlement actually do?

It repeatedly matches whoever is owed the most with whoever owes the most, and moves the smaller of the two amounts between them. That clears at least one person completely every time, so a group with a certain number of non-zero balances always settles in fewer payments than that number of people, however many currencies were involved along the way.

Where do I get the exchange rates to type in?

Use the rate that actually applied when you paid: the amount that landed on your card statement divided by the amount on the receipt, or the rate the exchange desk gave you in cash. The calculator does no currency lookups of any kind and holds no live rates, so a rate you have not typed in yourself is a rate it cannot know.