How Much We Spent Travelling for a Year

One of the questions we get asked most is simple: how much does it actually cost to travel for a year?

The honest answer is that it depends entirely on where you go and how you want to travel. But after a year moving through the US, Central America and South America, we got a pretty clear sense of what different budgets actually look like on the ground, and where our money made the biggest difference.

Here's our breakdown, based on what we actually spent.

The Three Budget Tiers

Roughly speaking, in the countries we travelled through, we found the budget split into three tiers per person, per month:

£1,000 per person, per month — the lower end

This is doable, but it's tight. You're staying almost exclusively in hostel dorms, cooking or eating street food most nights, taking the cheapest buses, and being selective about paid activities. It's a real budget, and plenty of long-term travellers do it, but there's not much room for spontaneity.

£1,400 per person, per month — the sweet spot

This is where we spent most of our trip, and where we'd recommend budgeting if you want to actually enjoy the year rather than just survive it. At this level you can mix dorms with private or double rooms, eat out properly a few times a week, book the occasional tour or activity without agonising over it, and take a faster or more comfortable bus or flight when you need to.

£2,000+ per person, per month — comfortable to luxury

At this level you're staying in private rooms or nicer guesthouses as standard, eating out regularly, taking domestic flights over long bus journeys, and booking multi-day tours and experiences without much thought. Still nowhere near luxury by home standards, but comfortable.

A note on where you are: these figures vary a lot by country. The US ran significantly higher than Central and South America across every category. Somewhere like Bolivia or Nicaragua can be genuinely inexpensive, while a few weeks in the US will eat through a monthly budget fast. Build your overall number as an average across the whole trip, not a flat monthly figure.

Where the Money Actually Went

Accommodation

This was one of the biggest swing factors in our budget, and the one most within our control. More on that below, because travelling as a couple changed this category more than any other.

Food

Street food and local markets were consistently the best value and, more often than not, the best food too. Eating out at more Western-style restaurants pushed costs up quickly, and we found the biggest budget wins came from eating like locals rather than seeking out familiar food.

Transport

Long bus journeys were the backbone of getting around, and they were cheap relative to flying, but they cost you in time rather than money. We budgeted for the occasional flight or faster bus route when a long overland journey wasn't worth the days it would take, and treated that as a worthwhile trade-off rather than a splurge.

Activities and tours

This is the category where per-day spending varied the most. Free things like hiking, beaches and simply walking around a city cost nothing. Multi-day tours, diving trips or anything involving specialist guides added up fast and were worth budgeting for separately rather than lumping in with day-to-day spending.

The extras

SIM cards or eSIMs, travel insurance, occasional laundry services, and small admin costs like visas all added up to more than we expected. None of these were expensive individually, but they're easy to forget when you're budgeting and worth building in from the start.

Why Travelling as a Couple Stretched Our Budget Further

This is probably the single biggest thing we'd tell other couples planning long-term travel: doing it as two people, rather than solo, made a real difference to how far our money went.

We only stayed in dorm rooms a handful of times across the whole year. Almost everywhere we went, a double or private room cost roughly the same as, or sometimes barely more than, two dorm beds, and it was a far better experience. More privacy, better sleep, somewhere to actually unpack rather than living out of a locker.

Splitting the cost of a room two ways rather than paying for a single dorm bed each meant our accommodation budget went a lot further than the per-person hostel dorm rate might suggest. The same was true for taxis, for private transfers when public transport was impractical, and for some tours where a private option split two ways wasn't much more than two individual spots on a group tour.

If you're planning to travel as a couple, it's worth budgeting properly for private rooms rather than assuming dorms are the default. In a lot of destinations, they're barely more expensive, and the quality-of-life difference is significant.

What We'd Budget If We Did It Again

If we were planning the same trip again, we'd budget around £1,400 per person, per month as our baseline, with more built in for the US portion of the trip and less needed for cheaper countries in Central and South America. We'd also budget for private rooms as standard rather than an occasional treat, given how little extra it actually cost split between two people.

The biggest lesson from a year on the road wasn't really about cutting costs. It was about knowing where spending more actually improved the trip, and where it didn't make much difference at all.