Split Bill Calculator - Who Owes Whom

Add the people in your group and every shared expense, and get each person's balance plus the minimal set of transfers to settle up. Free and browser-based, ideal for trips and group dinners.

People (3)

AlexSamKim

Expenses

Split among:
Split among:

Group total: 105.00

Balance per person

Alex+49.00
Sam-14.00
Kim-35.00

Positive = should receive, negative = should pay.

Settle up (2 transfers)

  • Kim pays 35.00 to Alex
  • Sam pays 14.00 to Alex

How Group Expense Settling Works

For every expense, the amount is divided equally among the people it was shared with, the payer is credited the full amount, and each participant is debited their share. Summing that over all expenses gives one net balance per person: positive means the group owes them, negative means they owe the group. A useful property of net balances is that they always sum to zero, so the tool can settle any history of expenses no matter how tangled.

The settle-up list uses a greedy algorithm: repeatedly match the largest debtor with the largest creditor and transfer the smaller of the two amounts. For a group of n people this needs at most n-1 transfers, far fewer than paying back each expense individually. A weekend trip with 3 people and a dozen shared costs typically collapses to just 2 transfers.

The per-expense checkboxes handle the situations that break naive bill splitting: the friend who skipped dinner but shared the taxi, or the couple who paid for their own museum tickets. Uncheck anyone who did not take part in a specific expense and their balance is untouched by it, while the cost is spread over the remaining participants only.

Everything stays in your browser, so you can total up a trip on your phone at the airport without creating an account or sharing the group's spending with a third-party app. For a single restaurant bill where you just need to add a service tip and divide by headcount, the Tip Calculator is quicker, and the Percentage Calculator covers ad-hoc share math like "what is 35% of 240".

How the Split Bill Calculator Works

  1. 01Add everyone in the group by name.
  2. 02Add each expense with its amount and who paid it.
  3. 03Untick people who did not share a specific expense.
  4. 04Read each person's net balance and the minimal transfers to settle up.

Settling Group Expenses Fairly

Enter expenses as they happened, not as who-owes-who guesses: the payer gets credited the full amount and every participant is debited an equal share. The balances then net everything out across the whole trip, so it does not matter that one person paid for dinner while another covered fuel. The settle-up list is the shortest path to zero: for n people it never needs more than n-1 transfers.

When to Use a Bill Splitter

Use it at the end of a group trip, a shared holiday rental, a festival weekend, or a recurring dinner club. It shines whenever expenses were paid by different people for overlapping subsets of the group, which is exactly the situation where mental math and spreadsheets start producing arguments.

Common Use Cases

Tips

  • Add expenses during the trip while you still remember who was there.
  • Use descriptions like 'Dinner Friday' so the group can verify the list afterwards.
  • Screenshot the settle-up list before closing the tab; nothing is stored.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the calculator minimize the number of payments?→
It computes each person's net balance, then repeatedly matches the largest debtor with the largest creditor. For a group of n people this settles everything in at most n-1 transfers. A 4-person trip with a dozen expenses typically collapses to 2 or 3 payments.
Can I split an expense between only some people?→
Yes. Every expense has checkboxes for who shared it. Untick the friend who skipped dinner and their balance is untouched by that expense, while the cost spreads over the remaining participants. By default every expense is shared by the whole group.
What if someone paid for something only they used?→
Either leave it out entirely, or add it with only that person ticked; both give the same result since they paid and consumed the whole amount, netting to zero. Include it only if you want the group total to reflect complete trip spending.
Can the tool split unequally, like by income or by room size?→
Not directly; shares within an expense are equal among the ticked participants. As a workaround, enter one cost as two expenses: a 900 rental where one couple takes the bigger room could be a 600 expense shared by all plus a 300 expense ticked only for that couple.
Why do all balances sum to zero?→
Every unit of money that someone is owed is a unit someone else owes: credits and debits are two sides of the same expense. This invariant is also a built-in error check; the settle-up transfers always exactly clear all balances.

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