U.S. Inflation Raises Cost Of Raising A Child To $310,605

Soaring inflation has made almost everything more expensive. And it has significantly increased the cost of one major budget buster -- raising kids, Ramishah Maruf reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: It now costs $310,605 for a married middle-income couple with two children to raise their youngest child from birth through high school.

It now costs $310,605 for a married middle-income couple with two children to raise their youngest child from birth through high school, according to a recent estimate from the Brookings Institution.

The estimate builds on a 2017 report from the US Department of Agriculture. Back then, the agency estimated that it cost a middle-income, married couple $233,610 to raise a child to the age of 17.

The price factored in expenses for food, shelter and other necessities for a child born in 2015, but notably not the cost of a college education, Anna Bahney and Danielle Wiener-Bronner also reported for CNN.

Brookings found that today's record-high inflation has dramatically increased those costs. Brookings first shared the numbers with the Wall Street Journal.

"It causes people to recognize that when you start having a family or when you increase the size of your family, you're going to have to make some tradeoffs with other items in your budget," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings Institution who authored the study with Brookings' senior research assistant Morgan Welch.

Housing is the biggest expense for families and accounts for almost a third of the total child-rearing costs.

The median home price in July -- $403,800 -- was up 10.8% from a year ago, marking more than a decade of year-over-year monthly gains. And prices rose across the country, with 80% of US metro areas seeing double-digit home price increases last quarter.

Food is the second most expensive budget item when raising a child, the USDA found, making up 18% of the total cost in its original calculation.

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