How much pocket money for a 7, 10 or 14-year-old in India?

Why this page has no table of amounts

Search this question and you will get age-wise tables — ₹200 for a seven-year-old, ₹500 for a ten-year-old, and so on. Look at who published them. Almost every one is on the blog of a company that sells children a prepaid card, and the numbers in them are not measurements of anything; there is no Indian survey behind them worth quoting.

It would be easy to print a table here too, and it would be the single most-read thing on this site. It would also be made up, and a made-up number that a parent uses to decide what to give their child is not a small lie.

So here is the method instead. It produces a different answer in Kochi and in Gurgaon, which is correct, because the honest answer to this question genuinely is different in Kochi and in Gurgaon.

Decide what it has to cover, then add it up

Pocket money is not a wage and it is not a reward. It is a budget handed to a child so that they can practise running one, which means the first question is not “how much” but “for what” — and the answer should be a written list, because a list is what makes the amount arguable rather than arbitrary.

Write down what you currently pay for on your child’s behalf that they could decide about themselves. For a young child that is often nothing more than the odd snack and a small toy. For a ten-year-old it may be a canteen day, a friend’s birthday present, and a comic. For a fourteen-year-old it may be lunch twice a week, a recharge, and going out on a Saturday.

Add up the list for a month, divide it by four, and that is the weekly amount. Not a round number pulled from the air — the cost of the specific things you have just handed over responsibility for. If the number looks too large, the list is too long; take something back off it and say which.

Three worked examples, using the method rather than a survey

A seven-year-old. The list is short: an occasional small snack and one small thing a month your child chooses. Perhaps three or four items, adding up to a modest weekly figure. At this age the amount matters far less than the regularity — money that arrives on the same day every week is what makes the saving lesson possible at all.

A ten-year-old. The list grows: the canteen on the day the tiffin is dull, a friend’s birthday present, something to collect. This is the age at which the list itself starts teaching, because they will begin arguing for items to go on it, and that argument is the exercise.

A fourteen-year-old. The list starts containing things with real prices — transport, lunch, a recharge, going out. Here the amount is no longer symbolic and the method matters most: agree the list, agree the amount, and then stop topping it up mid-month, which is the step that does all the work.

Raise it on a schedule, not on a request

Pick a date — a birthday, the start of the school year — and revisit the list then. Between those dates the amount does not move, and “I’ve run out” is answered with sympathy rather than money.

This is the least popular sentence on this page and the most useful one. An amount that can be renegotiated whenever it runs out is not a budget, it is an allowance with extra steps, and it teaches the opposite of the intended lesson.

Earned, given, or both

There is a long argument about whether pocket money should be paid for chores or given unconditionally, and both sides have a point: paid, and a child learns that effort has a price; given, and a child learns that some things are done because you live here.

Kulraise takes the both position, which is what most families do in practice. Habits a parent sets are worth what the parent says they are worth, and a parent can also simply pay an amount every week regardless. The app does not have an opinion about which; it just has to be able to do both without pretending they are the same thing.