Free Monthly Budget Template for Excel: a 12-Month Planner With Planned vs Actual

A monthly budget template is a grid with your income and spending categories down the side and the months across the top: you plan each month in advance, then compare it with what you actually spent. The free Excel template below does this for a whole year. Type your own numbers over the sample ones, and the totals, the money left over and your savings rate calculate themselves.

Below the download: a filled-in January for a household on 3,200 a month, why planning twelve months beats planning one, how to read the planned vs actual difference, and the formulas behind it.

What is in the template

• Planned: your budget, January to December. You type into the yellow cells; totals, remaining, saved and savings rate fill in automatically.
• Actual: the same layout for what really happened. Empty months are ignored, so averages stay correct even if you start in May.
• Difference: nothing to type. Plus (green) means a row went your way, minus (red) means you went over plan.
• Frozen headers, a How to use sheet, no macros and no hidden sheets.

This file plans by month and category. To log every single purchase, use the free expense tracker spreadsheet in our blog; its monthly summary gives you the figures for the Actual sheet here.

The 14 categories, and why these

Fewer categories hide where the money goes; more make the sheet tiring to fill in. The 14 rows fall into four blocks:

• Fixed home costs: Rent / mortgage, Utilities, Internet & phone, Insurance. Known on the first of the month.
• Living costs: Groceries, Transport, Health, Clothing. You control the amount, but it never reaches zero.
• Flexible spending: Eating out & fun, Holidays & gifts, Subscriptions. The first place to cut.
• Debt and savings: Debt payments and Savings. Savings sits among the expenses on purpose: money moved aside on payday is far more reliable than whatever is left at the end of the month.

Income has three rows: Salary (net), Side income and Other income. Rename a category on the Planned sheet only; the other sheets read the names from there.

Example: a January on 3,200 a month

The template comes with sample figures for a renting household with one net salary of 3,200 a month. January, planned against actual:

At first glance January looks fine: spending ended only 16 over plan. The rows say otherwise. Clothing (the January sales) ran 74 over, groceries 62 and heating 36, and the month balanced only because 150 went into savings instead of 300. The savings rate fell from a planned 14.1% to 8.9%. That is why the Saved row matters more than Remaining: overspending rarely shows up as a red total, it shows up as savings that quietly did not happen.

Why plan 12 months, not just this one

Months are not alike. In the sample plan, utilities cost 210 in January and 100 in June; July carries a 300 holiday and December 280 of gifts, so both months move only 150 to savings. Plan only the current month and these costs arrive as surprises.

Side by side, the twelve months answer questions a single month cannot. The year brings in 38,400 and planned outgoings, savings included, come to 36,145. The 3,300 in the Savings row plus the 2,255 that remains makes 5,555 put aside, a savings rate of 14.5%. The tightest month is December, with 50 left over, so part of the spring surplus should wait for it. Seeing that in January rather than in December is the point of a yearly budget.

How to fill in the Planned sheet

1. Start with net income, what actually reaches your account. Leave uncertain income (bonuses, freelance work) out and add it on the Actual sheet when it arrives.
2. Average the last three bills for utilities, phone and internet, and set heating separately for winter and summer.
3. Take groceries, transport and eating out from your last two months of statements. A grocery figure written from memory almost always comes out too low.
4. Put annual costs in their month: insurance renewals, holidays, birthdays. Our post on budgeting for annual expenses has a checklist.
5. Pay yourself first: put at least 10% of income in the Savings row. If Remaining goes negative, cut flexible spending before savings.

Planned vs actual: how to read the difference

The Difference sheet uses one rule for every row: plus is good for you, minus is bad. For expenses it calculates planned minus actual, so spending less gives a plus; for income and savings it is actual minus planned, so earning or saving more gives a plus. The last column adds the year so far. After the sample’s first three months it reads:

• Groceries -66: over in January and March, slightly under in February. A pattern, so the plan is too low: raise it to around 470 or decide where those 20 a month come from.
• Utilities -62: almost all in January and February. Seasonal, not a habit; raise next winter’s figures only.
• Clothing -27: one big January, then two quiet months. A one-off that has corrected itself.
• Side income +350: a freelance job in February. Thanks to it, the quarter still ends with 107 more saved than planned.

A useful rule: a minus in one month is noise, the same minus three months running means the plan is wrong. Change the plan rather than promising to try harder; a budget you keep missing teaches you to ignore it.

The formulas, explained

You never need to edit them, but here are the January versions on the Planned sheet:

• Total income: =SUM(B5:B7), total expenses: =SUM(B11:B24). Both sit inside IF(COUNT(...)=0,"",...), which keeps a month blank until it has numbers.
• Remaining: =B8-B25, income minus expenses.
• Saved: =B23+B27, the Savings row plus whatever remained.
• Savings rate: =IF(N(B8)=0,"",B28/B8). The IF only prevents a divide-by-zero error in an empty month.
• Year total and monthly average: =SUM(B5:M5) and =AVERAGE(B5:M5). AVERAGE skips empty months.
• Difference: ='Planned'!B14-'Actual'!B14 for an expense row and ='Actual'!B5-'Planned'!B5 for income and savings, which is what makes plus always mean good.

If your Excel or Google Sheets uses a comma as the decimal separator, which is the case across most of Europe and Latin America, formulas appear with semicolons instead of commas. The file works everywhere; this only matters when you type a new formula yourself.

When a spreadsheet stops being enough

A budget template is a good start, and some people never need more. The weak spot is the Actual sheet: to fill it in you need to know what you spent per category, which means recording every purchase somewhere. Most people who give up on budgeting give up there, not at the planning stage.

Personal Accounting is an iOS and Android app built for that part, with a free plan (with ads) and a Premium subscription. It follows the same logic as this file:

• Budgets with a monthly limit per category, checked against spending as you go rather than at the end of the month.
• Photograph a receipt and the AI reads amount, date and category, or say an expense out loud.
• Import a PDF bank statement to bring in a whole month at once.
• Savings goals, recurring transactions, debts with due dates, several accounts in different currencies, and a home-screen widget.

The app also imports CSV and Excel files with column mapping: you confirm which column is the date, amount, type, category and account, and missing categories and accounts are created along the way. The import is for transaction lists, not for a planning grid like this one, so bring your history in and copy the category limits from your Planned column.

The app does not connect to your bank and does not read your SMS or bank notifications. What goes in is what you photograph, say, type or import.

Frequently asked questions

Does the template work in Google Sheets?

Yes. Upload the .xlsx file to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets; formulas, colours and frozen headers carry over. Numbers and LibreOffice open it too.

Can I start in the middle of the year?

Yes. Plan from the current month onwards and leave earlier months empty; they are ignored by the averages and the Difference sheet.

What is a good savings rate?

Around 20% of net income is a common target, as in the 50/30/20 rule. With high fixed costs, start at 5 or 10% and raise it when a debt is paid off.

Is it really free?

Yes. There is no email gate and no sign-up: the download button above is the whole file. Use it, change it, share it.