Nursery budget planner
Splits the budget you have across sleep, travel, feeding, changing, clothes and the room, in your own currency, and separates what you need before the birth from what can wait months. It publishes no prices, and it names the only two items the NHS says must be bought new.
Nursery budget planner
No sign-up · PrivateIn the currency of the country you picked above. This tool never tells you what anything costs — it splits what you have.
Used to date the two deadlines that matter: when the car seat has to be fitted and practised, and when the "before the birth" list has to be done.
The safer-sleep advice is the same everywhere: same room as you for at least the first six months. It moves a lot of nursery spending later.
Changes the feeding list, which is where the sharpest difference in spending is.
Without a car the biggest single line on the budget changes completely.
Second-hand is fine for nearly everything. The two exceptions are named in the list below and they are not negotiable.
Your budget, split
16 before the birth · 9 in the first months · 8 can wait · 3 must be new · GBP
Country: United Kingdom — budget shown in GBP
Buy before the birth: 16 items
First couple of months: 9 items
Can genuinely wait: 8 items
Must be new: 3 items — Mattress; Rear-facing infant car seat; Bottles and teats, if you are formula or mixed feeding
Everything on the "before" list done by: 10 June 2026 (36 weeks) — because a birth from 17 June 2026 onwards is full term
Car seat fitted and practised by: 13 May 2026 (32 weeks). Fit it, take it out, and fit it again while you are still pregnant. It is much harder with a newborn in your arms.
Per item on the pre-birth and early list: £32 on average
Nothing you type leaves your device. The whole calculation runs in your browser.
How this is calculated
FormulaHow the plan is built
No prices, deliberately
This tool publishes no prices at all. Every “cost of a nursery” table online is a set of invented numbers that were wrong in half the countries reading them on the day they were written. Instead you type the budget you have, and the tool does the allocation, the priority ordering and the triage.
The allocation
Your budget is divided across six categories — sleep, car seat and getting about, feeding, changing and bathing, clothes, and the room itself — using shares that are this tool’s own rule for spending in priority order rather than a survey of what anyone spends. The shares are renormalised over the categories actually in play, so answering “no car” does not leave a third of the budget silently unassigned. Each category then shows the average per item for the things you need now.
The triage
Every item is placed in one of three bands: before the birth, the first two or three months, or can wait. Your answers move things between bands. Choosing to room-share pushes the nursery cot and the baby monitor into “later”, which is a large chunk of the traditional nursery. Answering “no car” moves the car seat out of the pre-birth list. A breastfeeding plan removes bottles and teats; a formula plan removes the pump.
New, second-hand, or check first
Each line is marked BUY NEW, second-hand fine or second-hand only if you know its history. Two items are always BUY NEW, and both come from the NHS: the cot mattress and the car seat. The Lullaby Trust adds that it is safest to have a new mattress for each baby, and that there is some evidence a mattress brought in from another home might very slightly increase the risk of sudden infant death.
The two dates
Counted back from the due date in whole days: the pre-birth list should be finished by 36 weeks, which is 28 days before the due date, because a birth from 37 weeks is full term. The car seat should be fitted and practised by 32 weeks, 56 days before, while you can still bend comfortably.
Why there are no prices on this page
Search for the cost of a nursery and you will find a table: cot, one hundred and fifty; pram, four hundred; changing table, eighty. Those numbers were invented by somebody who needed a table. They were out of date within a year, they were wrong in half the countries reading them on the day they were published, and they exist mostly to make you feel behind.
This planner does not do that. You type the budget you actually have, in your own currency, and it does the parts that are genuinely hard to hold in your head: dividing money across categories in priority order, and separating the things you need before you come home from hospital from the things that can wait six months or forever.
The two things to buy new
The NHS puts it in a single sentence: not everything needs to be brand new, except the cot mattress and the car seat.
On the mattress, the Lullaby Trust advises a new one for each baby, and notes there is some evidence that bringing in a mattress from another home might very slightly increase the risk of sudden infant death. If you are reusing one from within your own family, the NHS test is that it must be firm rather than soft, flat, fit the cot with no gaps, and be clean, dry, waterproof and not ripped or torn. The Lullaby Trust adds: not sagging, and stored somewhere clean, dry and smoke-free under a waterproof cover.
On the car seat, the NHS is equally direct. If you are getting a second-hand seat, only accept one from a family member or friend so you can be sure it has not been involved in an accident and is not too old, and do not buy one from a second-hand shop or through the classified advertisements. Crash damage to a car seat does not show.
Everything else can be second-hand
Prams, slings, travel cots, Moses baskets, baby baths, highchairs and above all clothes are handed around constantly, because babies outgrow things long before they wear out. In the UK the NHS points people at NCT nearly-new sales by name. Elsewhere it is buy-nothing groups, consignment sales, community equipment schemes and the friend whose youngest is now three.
What to check is the standard. Cots in the UK and Ireland work to the European cot standard; Australia and New Zealand use AS/NZS 2172; in the United States, cribs made before June 2011 do not meet the current federal standard and drop-side cribs are banned outright; in Canada, cribs made before September 1986 are illegal to sell, give away or use. Car seats are stricter still: Australia requires AS/NZS 1754 and a restraint bought overseas is not legal to use there, while Canada requires Transport Canada’s National Safety Mark under CMVSS 213 — not a CSA mark, which is a common error even on hospital checklists.
The advice that moves the most money
Room sharing. The guidance is to sleep your baby in the same room as you for at least the first six months, in their own clear, flat, firm sleep space. That one line moves the nursery cot, the nursery blackout blind and the baby monitor out of the pre-birth budget entirely, because for the first half of the first year there is nothing in the nursery to monitor.
This is why the list this tool produces is shorter, and cheaper, than the one you were handed by a shop. The rest of the safer-sleep setup costs almost nothing: baby on their back for every sleep, room between 16 and 20 degrees Celsius, and nothing else in the cot at all. No pillows, duvets, cot bumpers, soft toys, comforters, weighted bedding, positioning wedges or straps, pods or nests.
The quantities are the NHS’s
Six stretch suits, six vests, two cardigans in wool or cotton rather than nylon, at least four sheets, and a hat, mittens and socks or bootees for cold weather, or a sun hat for warm. Buy a couple of things in tiny baby size as well as newborn, because newborn size swamps some babies.
On nappies the NHS is deliberately vague and it is right to be: a small stock is handy, but you cannot be sure what size your baby will need before they arrive. Do not stockpile newborn size. The same applies to clothes beyond newborn — you will be given clothes, in quantities that will surprise you.
What to buy that nobody puts on a list
Wall anchors. Furniture and televisions pulled over by a toddler cause serious injuries and deaths every year, and a chest of drawers with the bottom drawer open is a step ladder that a one-year-old can climb. The straps come in the box with most flat-pack furniture and stay in the box. Fit them when you assemble it, not when the pulling-up starts.
A cordless blind rather than a corded one, for the same reason and at the same trivial cost: RoSPA records at least 33 young children dying in the UK because of looped blind cords since 2001. And a waterproof mattress protector, which is cheaper than a mattress and is the thing that saves it.
What this cannot do
It cannot tell you what things cost where you live, and it does not try. It cannot know what your family will give you, which for most people is the largest single variable in the whole budget. And it is a shopping tool, not safety advice: where it quotes a standard or a safer-sleep rule, follow the source rather than the summary, and follow the guidance published by your own health service.
Sources
- What you'll need for your baby — NHS, accessed
- What to buy for your newborn baby — NHS (Best Start in Life), accessed
- Mattresses and bedding — The Lullaby Trust, accessed
- Second-hand baby products — The Lullaby Trust, accessed
- New baby checklist: home and baby equipment — Raising Children Network (Australia), accessed
- Safe at Home — RoSPA, accessed