Is our budget
normal?
Your spending next to what frum families actually reported in published surveys, and what households across the country spend. Calm, sourced comparisons; no made-up averages.
Kosher Money 2024 · Nishma Research 2021 · Pew 2020 · BLS 2025
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Lines in line with or below the published figures
0 of 0
Families spending less / more on food
0% / 0%
Tuition, share of income
Each bar is a bracket of weekly food spending, labelled by its top: up to $100, $100 to $200, and so on.
Kosher Money and Nishma are open online surveys of people who chose to answer, mostly in the New York area, Lakewood and Baltimore; they are not a census of every frum family.
The short answer
Lines in line with or below the published figures
0 of 0
Food, tuition, housing, transportation, health care and clothing.
A comparison, not a judgment. Survey figures are what respondents reported, in the survey’s own brackets and words. Figures checked November 2026. Sources.
Line by line
How to read the comparisons.
Brackets, not averages
- Kosher Money published brackets. It asked families to pick a range, so the page shows which range you are in and how many answered below and above it.
- In line means the middle. Roughly the middle third of answers; below and above are the thirds on either side.
Medians and national averages
- Nishma published medians. Near means within 10% of the median tuition paid.
- BLS is everyone in America. Within 20% of the national average for your income group counts as in line. It is a reference, not a frum benchmark.
What is not here
- No frum figures for these lines. No survey we found published what frum families pay for rent, cars, health care, clothing or maaser, so those lines use national figures only.
- No local prices. A Lakewood rent and a Cleveland rent are different worlds; nothing here pretends otherwise.
Sources, checked November 2026
Every figure on this page, where it came from, and how the survey was run.
| Figures | Source and sample | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly spending on food (Table 9), total debt excluding mortgage (Table 7), feeling prepared for retirement (Table 11), earning enough to live comfortably by income (Figure 19) and by children at home (Figure 20), 40% with $10,000 or more in tuition assistance | Kosher Money “Frum Finance Survey”, analysis by Dr. Michelle Shain, JNPRI, with Living Smarter Jewish. Open online survey, July 17 to August 4, 2024; 2,994 US responses analyzed; not a probability sample. | Nov 9, 2026 |
| Median tuition paid ($31K Modern Orthodox, $20K Haredi), share getting assistance (41%, 52%), median household income ($188K, $136K), retirement comfort (48%, 29%) | Nishma Research, “The Finances of Orthodox Jewish Life”, summary, December 2021. Opt-in survey, November 2021; 2,306 respondents (1,334 Modern Orthodox, 972 Haredi). | Nov 9, 2026 |
| Where they live has a significant negative budget impact (33%, 34%); kosher food prices significant (16%, 18%) | Nishma Research, full report, pages 29 and 30. | Nov 9, 2026 |
| Cost of Jewish schooling a serious problem, 89% | Nishma Research 2017 survey of 3,903 Modern Orthodox respondents, as restated in the 2021 summary. | Nov 9, 2026 |
| Orthodox Jews who say they “live comfortably”, 26% | Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020”. Probability sample of 4,718 Jewish adults (430 Orthodox), November 2019 to June 2020. | Nov 9, 2026 |
| Food at home and away, shelter, transportation, health care, clothing, cash contributions, by income fifth and household size | Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures 2025 (released October 29, 2026), Tables 1101 and 1400. About 5,000 households interviewed each quarter. October and November 2025 were not collected during the federal shutdown; BLS reweighted. | Nov 9, 2026 |