Keep Above
What a cat costs
Food by the week, litter by the month, an insurance premium and the odd vet year — a cat's costs each run at their own rhythm, which is why one guessed figure usually misses. This calculator takes each cost at whatever rhythm you pay it, brings everything to a year, and reads it back per year, per month and per week — with a first-year figure that counts adoption, gear and first visits once. Every number is yours; the page holds no averages for any kind of cat.
Adoption or purchase, gear, first visits — counted once
Your estimate, not the page's
Put in each cost at whatever rhythm you pay it. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| A week | — |
|---|---|
| A month | — |
| A year | — |
| The first year, with setup | — |
| Kept for 10 years, all-up | — |
Does a cat cost the same in every year of its life?
A cat's costs arrive in a shape, and one yearly figure flattens it. The year a cat arrives carries what happens only once — settling in, the first fitting-out, the early visits — and none of it comes round again. After that the list mostly holds still: food, litter and the routine costs run at much the same rate year on year, which is the stretch a flat figure describes well.
The heavier years tend to sit at the far end, and a figure averaged over a whole life spreads them backwards over years that were quieter than that. This page cannot see where on that curve a particular cat sits, so the kept-for total is a sum rather than a picture of any one year to come.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
Vet bills, registrations and boarding keep their own schedule rather than a monthly one — how budgeting apps handle money set aside for later bills.
About this calculator
Why doesn't the page suggest typical cat costs?
Because what a cat costs depends on the cat — indoor or outdoor, age, health, appetite. Published averages span ranges so wide that a prefilled figure would be an assertion, not a help. Every box starts at zero and the page adds up what you put in, whatever kind of cat yours is.
How do the weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms combine?
Each row has its own rhythm switch, so a weekly food figure sits beside a yearly registration figure. Everything is brought to a year — weekly times 52, monthly times 12 — then read back per year, per month and per week. Switching a row's rhythm doesn't change the amount you typed.
What does the first-year figure include?
The ordinary year plus the one-off getting-started costs — adoption or purchase, gear, first visits — counted once. The kept-for total counts that one-off once too, so it never inflates the ordinary year.
Does it matter whether the cat lives indoors or outdoors?
It changes which rows carry the weight more than it changes the total. A cat kept indoors puts more into litter and into the gear that stands in for the outdoors, and those are steady, weekly-shaped costs. A cat that goes out moves weight towards the rows that arrive irregularly instead, so two cats on the same yearly figure can have very differently shaped months. The weekly read-back therefore describes an indoor cat's spending more closely than an outdoor one's, where more of the year arrives in a handful of months. The page assumes neither — every row starts at zero and takes only what you put in it.
Which rows are the ones a cat fills differently?
Litter and bedding is the plainest one: for a cat it is a weekly consumable that keeps going, where on a dog's form the same row is mostly bedding replaced now and then. Grooming is on the form because it applies to some cats and not to others, and a row left at zero is not counted at all. Minding and boarding covers two quite different arrangements — somewhere for the cat to stay, or somebody calling in — and the row takes whichever one is real rather than assuming a shape. Everything else is the same eight rows as any other animal, which is why one calculator serves them all.