Raising a child will cost you over $360,000 on average, says StatsCan

Everyone knows raising children isn’t cheap, but just how expensive can it get?

According to a new report from Statistics Canada, a family with two parents and two children, which the agency found is the most common family type, can expect to pay around $366,000 — per child — from birth until age 17.

So for their two children, it will cost that family around $732,000.

Those numbers are for a family with a mid-range annual household income between around $100,000 and $170,000. For lower-income families, that number drops to around $300,000 per child, and for higher-income families, it’s around $420,000.

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The cost of raising a child from birth until age 22 is about 29% higher across the board. This is largely due to tuition costs, the report says.

“In Canada, the question of affordability issues for families with children has become an increasingly important area of public policy,” the report says.

“Also, information on the monetary cost of meeting children’s needs for food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education is important for family planning and budgeting decisions made by people raising children.”

Unsurprisingly, the largest expense related to housing, which accounted for around a third of the total cost for all household types. This was followed by transportation, which was about 20 per cent of the total cost, and then food, also up to around 20 per cent.

Statistics Canada says it studied data from households by using questionnaires, in-person interviews, and daily expenditure diaries. The data presented in the report was in 2017 dollars and has been adjusted for inflation.