Best Free Budget Templates to Simplify Your Money

This article is educational information, not financial advice. Links below go to the organisations that publish each template. TheSchicht has no commercial relationship with any of them and earns nothing if you download one. Every link was checked on 13 July 2026.

Most articles about free budget templates do not link to a single budget template. They describe categories of template — "a student template", "a zero-based template" — and leave you to go and find one. This page previously did exactly that, which is why it has been rewritten from scratch.

So: six real templates, each named, each linked, each opened and checked. What each one is genuinely good at, what it gets wrong, which one I would pick, and the one that appears on every "free" list despite costing $99 a year.

Key takeaways

• The best free template for most people is the Monthly budget in the Google Sheets template gallery — because it syncs to your phone, and a budget you cannot see at the till is a budget you will not follow.
• If you want paper and no account, use the FTC's Make a Budget worksheet. It is a fillable PDF that adds itself up. It is also from 2012, and it shows.
• Tiller is not free. It is $99 a year after a 30-day trial. It appears on "free budget template" lists constantly. Ignore those lists.
• Nearly every free template has the same defect: no line for bills that arrive once a year. That gap is what makes a budget look right in January and collapse in April.
• The file the internet keeps linking to as "the CFPB budget worksheet" is not a budget worksheet. It is a bill-triage tool for months when you cannot pay everything — and on its own terms it is excellent.

How I checked these

I opened every template, downloaded the files, and read the PDFs line by line rather than trusting the description on the download page. Everything below returned a working page on 13 July 2026. Anything that was paywalled, demanded an email address before it would give you the file, or turned out not to exist was cut. That is why this list is six items long and not twenty — the honest count of genuinely free, genuinely good budget templates is small.

The Google Sheets Monthly budget — the one I would actually use

Open Sheets, go to File → New → From template gallery, and pick Monthly budget or Annual budget. Google documents the route in its own help pages on creating a file from a template. Free with any Google account.

It wins on one thing, and the thing is not the spreadsheet. It is that the sheet lives on your phone. Budgets do not fail at the kitchen table on Sunday; they fail on Thursday in a shop when you cannot remember whether there is $40 left in "food" or you already spent it. A template you can open in four seconds while standing in a queue is a different tool from one that lives in a folder on a laptop, even if the columns are identical.

What it does badly: the default categories are generic, the charts are decorative, and the annual version is a planning toy rather than a tracker. You will spend twenty minutes rewriting the category list. Do that — it is the only part that matters.

The FTC "Make a Budget" worksheet — best on paper, and older than it looks

Published by the Federal Trade Commission at consumer.gov: the Make a Budget worksheet (PDF), with a landing page and a plain-language guide to making a budget alongside it.

Two pages. Two income lines, then about thirty expense lines grouped under Housing, Food, Transportation, Health, Personal and Family, Finance, and Other. It is a genuine fillable form — type into it and the totals compute themselves, then it subtracts expenses from income for you. No account, no email, no cookie wall.

Now the part nobody mentions. The footer of the PDF reads "September 2012 | Federal Trade Commission | consumer.gov." This worksheet is fourteen years old, and its category list is a photograph of 2012. It has a line for "Fees for cashier's checks and money transfers" and a line for "Prepaid cards and phone cards" — it was built with unbanked and underbanked households in mind, and for that reader it is still sharper than most modern templates.

But there is no line for subscriptions. None. Not streaming, not cloud storage, not the gym, not the app that bills you $8.99 a month for something you last opened in March. In 2012 you could get away with that. In 2026 the missing line is where a meaningful chunk of the money goes, and a worksheet that has no box for it will quietly tell you that you are solvent.

Add the row yourself. It takes ten seconds and it is the single most useful edit you can make to this document.

Vertex42 — the best spreadsheets, with a licence worth reading

Vertex42 has been making these since long before it was a content-marketing genre, and the spreadsheets are better engineered than anything a bank gives away free:

• Personal Budget Spreadsheet — a yearly view, twelve months across, categories down. Excel, Google Sheets and OpenOffice.
• Personal Monthly Budget — planned versus actual, one month at a time. The right one if you are starting.
• Family Budget Planner — a longer category list built for a household with children.
• College Budget — term-based rather than monthly, which matches how student money actually arrives.

The catch is the licence. These are free for personal use, "not for distribution or resale" — fine for you, not fine for a workplace or a community group planning to hand out copies. And the site steers you toward a paid Money Management Template as the upgrade. You do not need it. The free personal monthly budget does the same job for a household of one or two.

Microsoft's Excel templates — free, but not free of a Microsoft account

Microsoft's budget template gallery (which now redirects to Excel on the web) offers, in Microsoft's own words, "free customizable budget templates" — monthly budgets, savings-focused sheets, college budgets. They open in Excel for the web, so you need a free Microsoft account, and you can export to PDF.

They are competent and slightly corporate. If you already live in Excel, start here. If you do not, Google Sheets is the same idea with less friction.

NerdWallet's 50/30/20 worksheet — good at one thing

NerdWallet's budget worksheet is free and sorts your spending into the 50/30/20 split — 50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings and debt. Its value is not as a monthly tracker; it is as a diagnostic. Fill it in once, see that your "needs" are 71% of take-home pay, and you have learned the most important fact about your finances in about fifteen minutes.

Then stop using it and go and use a real tracker. It is a mirror, not a system.

The CFPB tool that is not what everyone says it is

Search for "CFPB budget worksheet" and you will be sent to a file called cfpb_ymyg_budget-worksheet.pdf. I downloaded it and read it. It is not a budget worksheet.

It is Tool 5: When cash is short — Prioritizing bills and planning spending, from Module 4 of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Your Money, Your Goals toolkit. It has no income section and no category totals. What it has is a triage order for the month when the money does not cover the bills:

Protect your income (the car that gets you to work, the licence you need to hold the job) → Protect your shelter (rent or mortgage, and the utilities, because "reconnection is expensive") → Pay your obligations (child support, taxes, student loans) → Protect your assets and health (do not let insurance lapse).

That ordering is the opposite of what panic tells you to do — panic pays whoever is shouting loudest, which is usually the credit card. The CFPB is telling you to pay the things that stop you earning and stop you being housed first, and to accept the consequences on the rest. That is hard, correct, unfashionable advice, and it is sitting in a file that half the internet has mislabelled.

It is not the template you use in a normal month. It is the one you want in a bad one. Save it now, not then.

Comparison

The one that is on every free list and costs $99 a year

Tiller pipes your bank transactions automatically into Google Sheets or Excel. It is a good product. It is $99 per year after a 30-day trial, and there is no permanently free tier. It appears on "free budget template" roundups constantly, usually because the roundup is monetised and nobody opened the pricing page.

Say plainly what it is: paid software that automates data entry. If typing your transactions in is the thing that makes you quit, $99 may be the best money you spend this year. But it is not a free template, and a list that tells you it is has told you something false in its first paragraph.

The same honesty applies to Goodbudget, the digital envelope app: the free tier is real and usable, but it is an app with limits, not a spreadsheet you own. Check the current limits on their site before you commit to it, because they change.

Why your last budget broke in month four

Here is the flaw that runs through nearly every template on this page, including the government ones.

The FTC worksheet instructs you, in its own words: "If you have an expense that does not occur every month, put it in the 'Other expenses this month' category." Read what that actually does. In a month when no annual bill happens to fall due, that line is $0 — and the worksheet cheerfully reports a surplus you do not have.

Take a fairly ordinary set of once-a-year costs:

• Car insurance, paid annually — $780
• Vehicle registration renewal — $95
• Dentist, two visits, the part insurance does not cover — $240
• Christmas and birthdays — $600
• Annual subscriptions billed yearly — $185

That is $1,900 a year, or $158 a month, that a monthly template shows as zero for eleven months and then as a catastrophe in the twelfth. (Straightforward arithmetic — $780 + $95 + $240 + $600 + $185 = $1,900; ÷ 12 = $158.33. Substitute your own numbers, the shape does not change.)

So you budget in January. February looks fine. March looks fine. Then the insurance renewal lands in April, you put it on a card because the budget said you had a surplus, and you conclude that budgeting does not work. Budgeting worked. The template lied, because it only had twelve boxes and your life has thirteen.

The fix is one row. Add a line called "annual bills" near the top, next to rent, and pay $158 into a separate savings account every month as if it were rent. It is not savings and you must not think of it as savings — it is a bill that has not arrived yet. This single row is the difference between a template that survives a year and one that gets deleted in April.

How to actually use one of these

Downloading is not the hard part. Nobody has ever failed at budgeting because they could not find a spreadsheet. Four things decide whether it survives:

1. Start from your real transactions, not the placeholder numbers. Open your bank's last 90 days, total each category, divide by three. The template ships with a "Groceries: 400" that was typed by a stranger. Your number is not 400. Replace every default with a figure you got from your own statement.

2. Add the annual-bills row before anything else. See above. This is the row that decides it.

3. Give it ten minutes a week, at a fixed time. Not daily — daily is how people burn out by week three. A weekly slot on the same day, long enough to type in the week's spending and look at what is left. The mechanics of building the thing in the first place are covered step by step in our guide on how to create a budget that actually sticks.

4. Attack the fixed costs, not the coffee. A template is very good at showing you that you spent $47 on takeaways, and very bad at showing you that your rent, insurance and subscriptions are the reason the numbers do not work. The big wins hide in the bills you never renegotiate — see our piece on cutting the expenses you think you cannot change. And if you find that tracking every purchase is what kills your motivation, some of the quieter budgeting methods get you most of the result with a fraction of the admin.

A word on the thing at stake. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking found that 63% of US adults could cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent in 2023, and 13% said they could not cover it by any method at all (Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023). A budget template does not fix that on its own. But the annual-bills row is precisely the mechanism that stops a predictable $780 insurance renewal from becoming an emergency, and that is a smaller and much more winnable problem.

FAQ

Which free budget template should I download right now?

The Monthly budget in the Google Sheets template gallery, if you have a phone and a Google account. The FTC's Make a Budget PDF if you would rather have paper and give no one your email address. Pick one, spend twenty minutes replacing its categories with yours, and add an annual-bills row.

Is the CFPB budget worksheet good?

The file everyone links as "the CFPB budget worksheet" is actually Tool 5 of the Your Money, Your Goals toolkit, and it is a bill-prioritisation tool for months when cash is short, not a monthly budget. On its own terms it is very good — better than anything else here for a genuinely bad month. Just do not expect it to budget for you.

Are free templates worse than a paid app?

They are worse at one specific thing: typing. Paid tools like Tiller ($99/year) import transactions automatically, and if manual entry is what makes you abandon budgeting, that is worth paying to remove. Everything else a paid app does — categories, totals, charts — a free spreadsheet does identically.

Excel, Google Sheets, or a printed PDF?

Sheets if you want it on your phone. Excel if you already know Excel and work offline. Paper if writing things down is what makes them stick for you — that is a real effect and it is not a lesser choice. What matters is which one you will still be opening in November.

Do these templates work outside the US?

The spreadsheets do — Vertex42, Google Sheets and Excel templates have no currency or tax assumptions baked in that you cannot change in a minute. The FTC and CFPB worksheets are written for a US reader and mention US-specific things like renter's insurance and student loans, but the structure transfers fine. Change the currency symbol and delete the lines that do not apply.

How often should I update it?

Enter spending weekly; re-check your category averages every three months or whenever your income or rent changes. Do not rebuild it monthly — rebuilding is procrastination that feels like work.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission / consumer.gov — Make a Budget worksheet (PDF, September 2012) and Making a Budget
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Tool 5: When cash is short — Prioritizing bills and planning spending, from the Your Money, Your Goals financial empowerment toolkit
• Google — Create a file from a template (Sheets template gallery)
• Microsoft — Budget templates / Excel budget templates
• Vertex42 — Personal Budget Spreadsheet, Personal Monthly Budget, Family Budget Planner, College Budget, Money Management Template (paid)
• NerdWallet — Budget worksheet (50/30/20)
• Tiller — Pricing ($99/year, 30-day trial)
• Goodbudget — How it works
• Federal Reserve — Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023: Expenses, and the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking

Written by Muslih Abdiker Ali, editor of TheSchicht. Every template listed here was downloaded and opened; the PDFs were read in full. Links and prices verified 13 July 2026 — Tiller's price and Goodbudget's free-tier limits in particular are set by those companies and can change without notice, so check before you pay.