Group Expense Settle-Up Calculator
After a weekend away, one person paid for the hotel, another for petrol, a third for dinner, and everybody has a vague idea they are owed something. Paying everyone back individually means a payment between every pair. Netting everyone out first means a group of five never needs more than four payments, and often fewer, because most of what is owed simply cancels.
What this generator does
Adds up what everyone paid, works out each person's balance against an even share, then repeatedly has whoever is furthest behind pay whoever is furthest ahead until nobody owes anything. Where some of the group are square among themselves it settles them apart, which saves a payment for each such group.
How to use this tool
- List who is in the group.
- Enter each expense on its own line: who paid, what it was for, and how much.
- Work it out, and read the list of payments.
- Check the balances table to see who was ahead and who was behind.
Understanding the controls
- Who is in the group
- Names separated by commas. The total is divided evenly among everyone listed, whether or not they paid for anything.
- What was spent
- One line per expense: who paid, what it was for, how much. The description is carried through so the list stays readable.
Worked examples
- A £450 weekend: Alex paid £300 for the hotel, Sam £60 for petrol, Jo £90 for dinner
- Each person's fair share is £150. Two payments settle it — Sam pays Alex £90 and Jo pays Alex £60 — rather than the three payments a pay-everyone-back-individually approach would need.
Common use cases
- Squaring up after a group holiday or weekend away
- Settling a shared household's bills at the end of a month
- Working out who owes what after a group meal
- Settling costs for a stag or hen weekend
- Checking a splitting app's answer against the arithmetic
How this generator works
The payments are applied back to the balances and every person is checked to land on zero, which catches a rounding error as readily as a wrong figure. The balances are separately confirmed to cancel out, and the number of payments is checked against the guarantee that a group of any size never needs more than one payment fewer than there are people.
Randomness and fairness
Nothing is random. The same expenses always produce the same settlement.
For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.
Limitations and good to know
- The cost is split evenly among everyone in the group. Shares that vary by person, or expenses that only some people were part of, are not handled here; the itemised bill split generator works out uneven shares item by item.
- One currency only, and everything is settled in whole pence. Where the total does not divide evenly, the people named first carry one penny more than the rest — one pound among six is four shares of 17p and two of 16p — so the payments always clear to nothing.
- With up to sixteen people owing or owed, the payments are the fewest that can settle it: every way of grouping the people is tried. Past sixteen that search is not made (it doubles with each person), the result says so, and the payments are few rather than proved the fewest.
- It records what was spent, not what anybody agreed to spend.
Privacy and your data
Names and amounts stay in your browser. Nothing about your group's spending is transmitted or stored.
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