Free, no account
Splitting rent by room size
Measure each bedroom, add the measurements together, and give each person their room's share of that total. A 180 sq ft room in a house whose bedrooms total 500 sq ft pays 36% of the rent. Shared space is deliberately left out of the sum: everybody uses the kitchen, so putting it in changes every share by the same proportion and changes nothing about the answer.
43% of the rent
34% of the rent
23% of the rent
Opens on these exact numbers for whoever you send it to.
Three rooms of the sizes a three-bed actually has. Put your own square footage in — the shares move as you type.
Why square footage rather than income
Where the people sharing are not a couple, income tends to feel like the wrong basis: what you earn is your business and it has nothing to do with the flat. Floor area is the one thing everybody can see, nobody can argue with, and which does not require anybody to say their salary out loud.
It is also the method that survives somebody moving out. A room does not change size when its occupant does, so the split you agree today still works when the box room changes hands in March.
What to do about the ensuite
Square footage gets you a defensible starting point and not a finished answer. A room with its own bathroom, or the only one that does not face the road, is worth more than its floor area says. The usual fix is to take the calculated share and move it by hand — a flat amount everybody agrees, rather than trying to express a bathroom in square feet.
Do that adjustment once, out loud, at the start. It is a two-minute conversation in week one and a genuinely unpleasant one in month seven.
Measuring without a tape measure
Pace it. A normal adult stride is close enough to a metre, and the method only needs the rooms to be right relative to each other, not right in absolute terms — if every room is measured 10% large, every share comes out identical. The listing that let the flat is usually the faster route: floor areas are often on it.
Questions people ask
- Should shared space be included when splitting rent by room size?
- No. Everybody uses the kitchen and the living room equally, so adding them to the total scales every share by the same proportion and leaves the split unchanged. Bedrooms only.
- How do you account for an ensuite when splitting by room size?
- Square footage cannot express a bathroom. Work out the shares by area first, then move a flat amount everybody agrees onto the ensuite room. Agreeing that adjustment at the start is much easier than raising it later.
Other ways to split it
- Splitting rent three waysThree people, one rent, and a number that rarely divides cleanly. Even, by income or by room size, with the leftover cents handled. No account needed.
- Splitting rent by what each of you earnsAdd both take-home figures, work out each share, apply it to the rent. Shows the percentage of each salary beside each amount. Free, no account.
- When somebody moves out mid-monthProrating the last month, redividing the rent between whoever is left, and what happens to the deposit. Calculator for the new split, no account needed.
Agreeing it once is the easy half
Applying it to the rent, the power, the internet and the four subscriptions, every month, is the half that needs help. Pairly holds the split and does that part — no bank connection, no card to start.