A real monthly budget

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-25. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

What it actually costs to start covers the wall of setup costs before your first payslip. This one is about the steady state: the ordinary month, twelve times a year, once the deposit is paid and the flat-pack is built.

A note on the numbers, because I'd rather be straight than impressive. This is a worked example, not a photograph of my bank statements. The tax and National Insurance figures are exact for the 2026/27 tax year and you can check them. The living costs are honest ranges from published sources and from what a shared house actually spends. I've kept the same illustrative setup as the earlier article for continuity: a £22,000 salary — the median advertised wage across the live Level 6 and 7 vacancies on this site — and a £120-a-week room in a shared house in a mid-size English city.

Your numbers will differ. The shape won't.

What actually lands in your account

Start with the payslip, because almost nobody entering their first job has any idea how much of a salary they don't get.

On £22,000, for 2026/27:

So a £22,000 salary is about £1,547 a month in your account with the minimum pension contribution, or £1,613 without one.

Three things about that table.

The pension line is the one worth keeping. At 18 you're not automatically enrolled — that starts at 22 — so you have to ask to join, and it's the best-value £66 on this page. Saving on an apprentice salary explains why.

You have no student loan repayment. A graduate on the same salary pays 9% of everything above their repayment threshold, every month, for decades. That's a permanent monthly advantage of this route that never shows up in a salary comparison.

And in your first month or two the number may be odd — payroll cut-offs, an emergency tax code, a part-month. It settles.

The fixed costs

These are the ones that leave whether you engage with them or not.

Rent — £520. A £120-a-week room. SpareRoom's rental index puts the UK average room at £761 a month, but London pulls that up hard; in cities like Birmingham, Leeds or Sheffield a decent room in a shared house sits closer to £550–£650. Check actual listings in your actual city before you trust any of this.

Bills — £0 to £90. Plenty of room-by-room lets are bills-inclusive, in which case skip this. If not, a four-person house splitting energy, water and broadband lands somewhere around £60–£90 each, with energy the big variable. The Ofgem price cap caps unit rates rather than your total bill, and four adults use more than the "typical household" in the headlines.

Council tax — £0 to £110. The one that surprises apprentices. You are not a student for council tax purposes, whatever your library card says. There's an apprentice disregard, but it only applies if you earn £195 a week or less, which on a real salary you don't. On a joint tenancy the bill is yours and your housemates'; on individual room contracts the landlord usually covers it. Find out which you're in before the letter arrives.

Transport — £40 to £100. Walking is free, a bus pass is at the low end, and driving is at the high end once you include fuel, insurance and parking. If you're weighing where to live against what you'll spend getting to work, live in the city or commute? does that sum properly.

Food — £150 to £220. Shopping for one person who's out of the house ten hours a day is a skill nobody teaches you, and the first two months are expensive while you learn it. This range assumes cooking most nights and buying lunch sometimes.

Phone — £10 to £25. SIM-only, if you've resisted a handset contract.

Contents insurance — £5 to £12. Your laptop lives in a shared house with several copies of the front door key. Cheap, worth it.

Subscriptions — £10 to £30. Music, a streaming service or two, the gym if you go. This line grows silently.

Add it up and the fixed monthly reality is roughly £735 to £1,000, most likely a bit over £800 in a bills-inclusive room or nearer £950 without.

Which leaves, on £1,547 take-home, somewhere around £550 to £800 a month of genuinely free money.

At 18. That's the headline, and it's a genuinely unusual position to be in.

Where the free money actually goes

Here's where budgets written by careful adults become useless, because they list the free money and stop.

The specific pressure on this route is that your social life is your cohort, and your cohort is forty people in the same city doing the same thing at the same time. There is always something on. Nobody's at home on a Tuesday because everyone lives with five other people the same age.

Realistically, in a normal month:

• Going out — £150 to £300. Pubs, meals, the occasional big night. Cohort social life is heavily pub-shaped and it is not cheap.
• Trips home — £30 to £80. Trains, or fuel. More often in year one than you'd expect.
• Clothes — £20 to £60 averaged. You need more work-appropriate clothing than you own at 18, and it wears out.
• Everything else — £50 to £100. Haircuts, birthdays, the thing that breaks, the takeaway on the night an assignment is due.

That gets you to somewhere between £250 and £540 of discretionary spend, and it explains why so many first-year apprentices are surprised to be saving nothing despite feeling comparatively rich. The money isn't disappearing mysteriously. It's going on a full social calendar that your friends at university are funding with a maintenance loan and you're funding with earnings.

The lines every budget forgets

Annual and irregular costs are what turn a plan that works on paper into one that doesn't.

Christmas and birthdays. Travel home at holidays, booked late. A festival or a trip with the cohort — someone will organise one. Car MOT, service and insurance renewal if you drive. Dentist and optician. Your phone dying. Deposit top-ups or overlapping rent when you move house at the end of the tenancy year.

Call it £600 to £1,500 across a year, arriving in unhelpful lumps.

The fix is the one boring technique that works better than any app: divide the annual total by twelve and move it out on payday. Fifty to a hundred a month into a separate pot, untouched. It converts a series of small crises into a line item, and it's the single habit that most separated people in my cohort who were relaxed about money from people who weren't.

Three variations, because £22,000 isn't universal

On the minimum wage floor (£15,600). Some Level 6 vacancies do advertise at or near the apprentice minimum. That's £1,300 gross, roughly £1,229 a month take-home before pension (£1,190 after a 5% contribution). Against £800 of fixed costs, you have around £400 of free money, and the £520 room is a much bigger share of your income. It's doable, and it is genuinely tight — this is where living at home, if it's an option, changes the picture completely.

Later in the programme (£26,000). Gross £2,167, take-home around £1,853 before pension, £1,771 after. Your fixed costs barely moved. That whole increase, about £220 a month, is free money — and what happens to it is the subject of lifestyle inflation.

London (£28,000, £1,000 room). Take-home around £1,883 after a 5% pension contribution. A room at £1,000 plus bills, plus £150 or so on travel, and your fixed costs are pushing £1,350. You're left with roughly £500 — less free money than the £22,000 example outside London, on a salary £6,000 higher. A London premium that doesn't cover the rent gap is not a pay rise, and it's worth doing this arithmetic before accepting a London offer that looks better on the headline.

How to actually build your version

Four steps, none of which require a spreadsheet you'll abandon in March.

Look at three months of real statements. Not what you think you spend — what your banking app says you spent. Almost every app now categorises it for you. Your real budget is made of your own behaviour, and it will contain at least one number that genuinely shocks you.

Move money on payday, not at month end. Savings and the annual-costs pot leave the account the day you're paid. What's left is what you have. Budgeting by willpower at the end of the month has never worked for anyone.

Use separate accounts. One for bills, one for spending, one for saving. Most banks now do this with pots or spaces. It removes the entire class of problem where rent money is technically in the account and spiritually already spent.

Set the standing order to something you can survive. A savings rate you abandon in month three is worse than a smaller one you keep for four years. Start at £100 a month and raise it every time your salary steps up.

The honest summary

An apprentice salary in year one is enough to live independently, run a house, have a social life and save something — and it is not a lot of money. Both of those are true and people tend to insist on only one.

What makes it feel different from being skint at university is that it's yours, it arrives every month whether or not you did anything clever, and it goes up each year while your rent mostly doesn't. By year three the same lifestyle costs the same and the money coming in is meaningfully larger, and that's when this route starts to feel financially distinct rather than just early.

The thing to protect between now and then is the gap. Everything in saving on an apprentice salary depends on it, and everything in lifestyle inflation is about the forces quietly trying to close it.