Trip Budget Calculator

Pick a destination, your number of days, how many of you are travelling and a travel style, and this page builds an itemised estimate: lodging, food, local transport, activities, and the government fees that genuinely apply. The two halves are deliberately different. Daily living costs are ranges, because they are ranges in real life, and each one is labelled with where the band comes from and is a box you can type over. The mandatory fees are exact, taken from the authority that charges them, which is where most trip-cost articles get it wrong: the $80 America the Beautiful pass does not cover a timed-entry reservation, the Dominican e-ticket is free, and non-residents now pay $100 a head at eleven US parks. Totals come out in US dollars and in the local currency at a dated rate you can edit.

How it works, how to use it, and what it does not cover

The calculator adds four daily lines and one fee line, then applies a buffer. Lodging is rooms times nights, where rooms is your party divided by the people sharing each room, rounded up, and nights is one fewer than your days on the ground — a three-day trip is two nights, and a single-day trip needs no room at all. Food, local transport and activities are per person per day across every day including arrival and departure. Fees are whatever you tick, charged per person, per vehicle, per party or per reservation as the issuing authority charges them, and each one carries its own editable quantity where you might do it more than once. The buffer, 10 per cent by default, is added last to the whole subtotal.

Why the living costs are ranges, and where the bands come from

Nobody can tell you what a hotel room will cost on your dates, and an article that gives you one confident figure for "a day in Costa Rica" has invented it. So each daily line is a band, with a low, a likely middle and a high, and the page states the basis. For Hawaii the band is anchored on an official statistic: the state's Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism publishes per-person-per-day visitor spending, which for January to August 2026 ran from $253.30 on Oahu to $336.40 on Maui, with Kauai at $319.90 and Hawaii Island at $270.00. The mid-range band here is built to land inside that, and it does. For the Dominican Republic there is a second official anchor: the Banco Central's tourism series puts average daily spending by non-resident foreign visitors at US$179.48 in 2026 so far, against US$170.94 for 2025, on an average stay of 7.8 nights — and the mid-range band here comes out at almost exactly that figure, which is a useful sanity check rather than a coincidence we engineered. For the other five destinations no equivalent official daily statistic exists, so the bands are built from the verified ticket and transport prices in our own guides plus the general level set by those two official series, and they are labelled as estimates throughout. Replace them. The override boxes are the point of the tool.

The fees are the part that is exact — and the part everyone gets wrong

• The America the Beautiful pass is $80, and it does not cover a reservation. It covers entrance fees at National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps sites, for one private vehicle or four people where fees are per person. Timed entry at Rocky Mountain ($2), the Cadillac Summit Road at Acadia ($6) and the Haleakala sunrise slot ($1) are separate bookings on recreation.gov that sell out independently of your pass. Camping, parking at some sites and concessioner fees are not covered either.
• Non-residents pay more at US parks from 2026. The annual pass is $250 rather than $80, and at Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Zion a non-resident aged 16 or over pays an extra $100 per person on top of the entrance fee unless admitted on an annual pass. Free entrance days are now for US citizens and residents only.
• Machu Picchu has two prices and a surcharge. A foreign adult pays S/152 for a standard route, and from 1 May 2026 an S/11 SERNANP conservation charge sits on top, so S/163. The climbing routes — Machu Picchu Mountain, Huayna Picchu and Gran Caverna — are S/200 plus the same S/11. Tickets are personalised, non-transferable and capped daily, which is why they are a fee and a deadline at the same time.
• Costa Rica's parks are cheap, online and inflexible. Manuel Antonio is US$16 plus 13 per cent IVA for a non-resident adult, sold only through SINAC's website, and the park is closed on Tuesdays. Arenal Volcano is US$15. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve publishes times and trail caps but no price, so that line is left blank for you to fill in from your booking.
• The Dominican e-ticket is free. It is required for every entry and every exit, the immigration service lists it at no cost, and the sites charging US$20 to complete it for you are reselling a government form. The $10 tourist card is included in airline charges.
• Hawaii's reservations are small and easy to miss. Haleakala sunrise is $1 per vehicle on top of the $30 entrance, Diamond Head is $5 per person plus $10 per vehicle, and Haena State Park is $5 per person for entry or $10 per vehicle for parking, where the parking covers the people in the car. The $55 Hawaii Tri-Park pass beats paying $30 at Haleakala and $30 at Hawaii Volcanoes separately. Pearl Harbor itself is free; parking is $7 a day.
• Honduras and Puerto Rico charge nothing to arrive. Honduras requires no visa or fee for stays of 90 days or less. Puerto Rico is US domestic travel, so there is no entry fee, no exit tax and no currency step — the El Yunque corridor is free and needs no reservation, and only the optional El Portal visitor centre charges, at $8 per person or $4 with an Interagency pass.

What it does not cover

Flights to the destination, travel insurance, visas where one is needed, shopping, nightlife, baggage fees, rental-car insurance and deposits, resort fees, and tips beyond the normal restaurant tipping on your food line. It does not model lodging taxes, which matter most in Hawaii, where state and county accommodation taxes add roughly 18 per cent to a room rate on top of the general excise tax — so if you type a nightly room price in, use the all-in figure your booking shows. It does not know the season: Christmas, New Year, Easter and the Hawaiian and Caribbean winter high season all run above these bands, so lean to the high column then. It cannot see live availability or book anything. And it does not handle an all-inclusive package cleanly: if that is your trip, put the nightly package price into lodging and set food, transport and activities to zero, then add excursions you will buy on site.

Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no rate API, no tracking and no storage. Every figure is dated, and the fees change: open the official link before you rely on a number.

Data last verified 2026-10-23. Prices, hours and rules change; confirm with the official source before you go.