Split a total bill evenly, or settle up a group trip or shared dinner where everyone paid different amounts — instantly see who owes who how much.
When a group spends money together, it's fair if what everyone ends up paying equals the total spend divided by the number of people. In real life it rarely works out that way — one person swipes their card for the restaurant, another covers the taxi, and someone else pays for nothing at all. "Fair" doesn't mean everyone re-pays their own share from scratch — it means looking at the gap between what each person already paid and what they should have paid, then settling that gap with as few transfers as possible.
If you try to split every individual expense evenly — dinner split one way, taxi split another, hotel split yet another — the math gets messy fast, and it's easy to lose track of who already covered what. The correct approach is to first work out the total spend for the whole trip and the fair average per person, then compare that against what each person actually paid. The difference is exactly what they're owed or what they owe — you never need to track individual expenses once you have the totals.
Split everyone into two groups: people who are owed money (they overpaid) and people who owe money (they underpaid). Think of it like a graph — each person is a point, and debts are lines connecting them. If you settled every original payment one by one, you could end up with a lot of transfers. Instead, repeatedly matching whoever is owed the most with whoever owes the most, transferring the largest amount possible each time, settles all the debts in close to the fewest possible transfers. That's exactly what this calculator's "Transfer Suggestions" section does — this technique is often called "debt simplification."
Say Mike paid $400 for the hotel, Julia paid $200 for dinner, Amy paid $120 for tickets, and Sam paid nothing up front. Total spend = 400+200+120+0 = $720, and with 4 people that's $180 each on average. Comparing that to what each person actually paid: Mike overpaid by $220 (owed money), Julia overpaid by $20 (owed money), Amy underpaid by $60 (owes money), Sam underpaid by $180 (owes money). Matching the biggest ower with the biggest owed: Sam transfers $180 to Mike first (Sam is settled, Mike still needs $40); then Amy transfers $40 to Mike (Mike is settled, Amy still owes $20); finally Amy transfers the remaining $20 to Julia (both settled). Just 3 transfers, and everyone's real net cost ends up at exactly $180 — the same result as if you'd worked it out by hand.
Amounts are rounded to two decimal places for display. In debt settlement mode, if the total doesn't divide evenly you might see a rounding difference of less than a cent — that's normal rounding behavior and doesn't affect the overall fairness of the split. Who absorbs that last cent (or whether you just ignore it) is entirely up to you.
The calculator doesn't lock in a currency — the "$" symbol is just a generic label. Use it for USD, TWD, JPY, EUR, or anything else, as long as every number you enter uses the same unit (don't mix, say, dollars and yen in the same calculation).
No. This tool runs entirely in your browser — the page makes no fetch or API calls of any kind. Everything you type only exists in your current browser tab and disappears the moment you refresh or close the page; nothing is ever sent to a server.
No, the name field can be left blank and the tool will automatically label rows "Person 1," "Person 2," and so on for a quick calculation. If you're sharing the transfer suggestions with friends to actually settle up, though, real names or nicknames will make it much clearer.
The transfer suggestions only guarantee the fewest possible transfers to make everyone's final balance come out even — they don't account for who's actually comfortable paying who in real life. Feel free to rearrange the pairings yourselves; as long as each person's total sent or received matches the suggested amounts, the result is exactly as fair.