How much of your take-home pay do you set aside for holidays?

[Kidsandhouse]

Following on from the how much did you spend on your holiday this year, approx how much of your take home pay do you set aside for hols?

We are 5, 2ad, 3 tweens/teens... we spend about 1 month of one salary..,. (We earn similar anounts) Includes flights accommodation and spending.

It’s interesting as I think lots of people prioritise holidays & often on mortgage threads you see posters with tiny mortgages but the holiday threads have ££££ budgets although I guess it’s a reflection of the older MNs user base.

We probably spend 1 months salary on holidays for the whole year, we haven’t spent one months salary on 1 holiday since dc.

Approx 3x 1 salary in a normal year.

Probably around 1 months salary for both me and dh now i think about it!

We put £700 a month in a holiday savings account (take home is £8500 so I think that’s about 8%) DH gets a £2000 bonus about every 18 months or so and that goes in that pot too. So one month salary is about right for us too really.

Although when we were lower income we put in proportionally more, I remember we used to put more in the holiday savings than our (old) mortgage cost! Then alas the children became teenagers!

We aren’t that structured with it and it varies a lot year on year depending on what else we need to spend money on. This year we spent probably a months take home but that’s the first time we’ve ever spent that much on a holiday, it was a bit of a last hurrah before the next baby comes.

Next years will be significantly less.

But my children are still little. It isn’t really the time of life for it. If I had to guess we’ll probably spent around £1,000 on holidays next year depending on how much mat leave I take. I don’t think we’ll go abroad.

We have a general savings pot that we put money into every month. There needs to be spare money in there for it to be spent on a holiday.

This year we've had a couple of big trips, and closer to 60% of my annual take home pay has gone on holidays in 2026. That covers 3 trips abroad and includes trips to the Lake District and London and anything else we do travel wise domestically. That is more than we typically spend in a single year, but travel is hugely important to me and we spend on that rather than other things, like our car is 13 years old, we don't go out socially very often, I rarely buy clothes for myself.

Nothing, currently. I haven't been on holiday in years

50% of my salary goes on travel, so 25% of household income. We usually take 2 1/2 weeks off in the summer, one week in Spring and one week in October all abroad plus 3 long weekends in the UK.
I appreciate this is unusual and that we are fortunate to do this, but we prioritise holidays and time away over other aspects of life.

I think this is interesting, because spending 10k on a holiday is understandable if you take home 10k a month but a bit mad if you only take home 1k per month ... (But your choice of course, I would never judge when it comes to holidays, the more the better! 🤣 )

Probably around 30%, maybe a little more.

But, ands it’s a massive but, mortgage paid off, cars owned outright, all DCs through uni. So possibly scope to push it higher as our monthly basic costs are now fairly limited.

Go back not too many years and that percentage would have been far lower.

Our take-home pay is £5200 and we save £400 per month for holidays. We plan to increase this after Christmas when DHs car is paid off and then again next summer when I go back to work after mat leave.
Pre-children, we just booked what we wanted without any budget or plan!

We don’t set aside for holiday. we have separate bill accounts we save into each month. So if one of those gets to an ok figure and nothing else crops up we have a caravan or cottage SC UK holiday. Didn’t have one last year. And this year COL in general, mortgage and some unexpected emergency bills like £3k getting car repaired last month means there’s nothing left at the moment.

We are hoping to go away in January if we can find a nice cabin. We have a Christmas kitty saved of £600 so far but we’ve cut back on Christmas completely and just put the tree we already own up, standard food, stockings for adult DC and pets so we are going to use that to go away instead. If not we foresee we won’t get a break next year either.

We are on an above average income so never thought we’d get to this sort of income tbh but now we have we are struggling. Live in SE so very expensive nearly everything goes on mortgage, council tax, utilities and food . We are just 2 adults and pets so we should be enjoying life a bout more now we are older. Everyone else we know have no budgeting like us and holidays whenever they want them. Life is pretty depressing.

Roughly 2 months of dh's take home. But we live in a smaller house with a paid off mortgage and drive cheap cars. I know some people eye roll at how much we spend sometimes but have 2 cars on pcp at £500 a month without batting an eyelid. It's all just different priorities and choices.

Dh and i.put £300 each in the holiday pot. I earn £2556. Dh similar

Our mortgage is the same amount as our holiday savings direct debit (although the mortgage is only £400, we overpay 200

We have always allocated our "extra" income for holidays. In the past, I did 24/7 on call one week per month (and xmas/new year), and put that allowance plus my overtime money into an account for holidays.

Now, I work in a job where I get a bonus most years, and that is my holiday budget. Lately, its been about one month of joint take home pay.

I tend to spread it across multiple smaller breaks, mostly in the UK, rather than a single big holiday. I tend to have a more expensive trip abroad every few years. I also try to always save a bit for the following year, in case the next bonus is low.

It's a bit of a precarious strategy, which has worked well to date, but will dry up at some stage, so interesting to see what others do.

We spend about 10-20% of our salary on holidays. This gets us one long haul holiday, then 3 European (week long) holidays. This doesn’t include uk based trips as we book as and when we want to go.

Me too

If I include the little one off trips as well as our main holiday it’s probably about 1.5 months of net salary? It would be a lot less but DH has unfortunately got a taste for Ikos holidays and those are not the cheapest of things.