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When 10-year-old Ollie leaves the doors of his Center Slope school, the world is his oyster. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, he and his friends stop by the deli to pick up Gatorade Zero and BBQ potato chips before heading off to their after-school program. On Thursdays, Ollie adds a pack of Hubba Bubba or AirHeads gum to the mix. “It’s kind of like a prize that’s given out almost at the end of the week,” he explains. Sometimes he skips the deli and grabs something tasty from the nearby Bakehouse showroom. At $3.95, a single Belgian waffle eats up nearly half of his $10 weekly allowance, but it’s worth it. “The Belgian waffles are so great,” he says.
The boys all have money to spend, although not in the same amount. Some get the number of dollars tied to their age (that used to be the case with Ollie and his brother Owen until their mother Rebecca got tired of them fighting over their different payouts), others get a lot more. Ollie says he’s happy with his $10, but Owen says he could use a raise. “I just take it to the deli right away and spend it all,” he says. His snack purchases often exceed his budget and he has to beg his mother for extras, which she almost always provides.
Ask any parenting “expert” or financial advisor why children should receive pocket money and they will comment on the topics of “learning the value of a dollar,” “responsibility,” and “money management.” But many of the New York parents I spoke with said they view the allowance differently: as an essential cost of parenting, right alongside summer camps and birthday parties. While a suburban kid asks for a trip downtown to grab a weekly drink at Starbucks or save up to buy something on Amazon, New York tweens and teens are faced with dozens of stunning retail stores multiple times a day (not to mention the heavenly smell of sizzling pizza and baking croissants). With long commutes, friends from far-flung neighborhoods and small apartments, pocket money is a way to pay for their entry into much-needed third spaces, says Catie Hogan, personal finance expert and author of the book Cent humor newsletter. “It’s not just a normal currency,” says Hogan. “It’s a social currency.”
How much subsidy a child receives depends not only on their parents, but in many cases also on the norms in their circle of friends and how many shops are on the way between school and home. In Manhattan, packed with Duane Reade, CVS, Target, bakeries and bodegas, the pull to shop can be particularly strong. I’ve talked to parents on the Upper East Side who let their kids buy Butterfield Market sushi every day, and heard from deep-pocketed teenagers who not only indulged in slices of pizza and sodas after school, but also gave them to all of their friends (which caused one mother to panic slightly because her budget-conscious child was considered a freeloader).
What is “enough” for a tween or teenager from New York City to not feel left behind? Among users of Greenlight, a family finance app that allows parents to automate allowance payouts, the average annual allowance provided by parents in New York in 2025 was $831, or about $16 per week. (The national average was $347.) But when I spoke to parents, I heard that children received as little as $5 to $200 a week. I’ve heard of kids overdrafting their Apple Pay accounts, listing their baseball cards on auction apps to supplement their snack budget, and investing their pocket money in the stock market (with unknown returns), while others had to complete a list of tasks to buy a soda from a vending machine on a Saturday. Christine, a mother from Park Slope, uses Apple Cash to give her 11- and 13-year-old daughters $15 and $20, respectively, every Sunday. “I want them to be able to do little things with their friends and not feel left out,” she told me. “I also don’t want to give them so much that they say, ‘Oh, I have so much money that I can buy whatever I want.'” They receive bonuses for completing tasks that go beyond their everyday duties. Recently, Sara, a West Village mom, told me she was thinking about a raise her 17-year-old son’s weekly allowance from $20 to $40. “It seems excessive, but it will all go into the food,” she says. “A lot of kids’ social lives consist of grabbing a bite to eat after school or going out to lunch. And if your friends don’t want to eat 99 cent pizza, you don’t have much of a choice.” Despite the increase, she admits it still doesn’t seem like enough for her son.
“The right amount is never a number — it’s a concept,” says Ron Lieber, personal finance columnist at New York Just and the author of The opposite of spoiledhimself a Brooklyn father of two. “We want them to have just enough so that they have what they need and some of what they want – but not so much that they don’t have to make difficult decisions on a regular basis.”
For his 10-year-old daughter, Lieber follows a dollar benchmark per child age, with the amount divided into spending, saving and giving buckets. “It’s $10 a week – $4 to spend, $3 to save and $3 to give,” he says. Right now, she spends her money at Sephora or on boba tea (“which we usually pay for when a friend comes over to hang out,” he says). But he expects that amount to change “once she’s in middle school and has a digital device next year.” The goal, he says, is to make learning an ongoing conversation that evolves with your child.
Aurora, Christine’s 11-year-old daughter, is happy with her pocket money. “Fifteen dollars is enough for me to get Dunkin’ Donuts every day after school if I want. But it’s not so much because I have too much money,” she says. “A kid in my class said he gets $100 a week, which I think is absolutely crazy. Who needs $100 a week?”
Bethany, a mother of three from Battery Park City, has given her now 17-year-old son $100 a week since the 10th grade. She explains where most of it goes: “There’s no cafeteria at his school where he can actually eat lunch.” She estimates he spends about $15 a day eating out. “He mixes everything up, so it goes from pizza to Chick-Fil-A. Sometimes he goes to the bodega and gets bacon, egg and cheese for lunch, or he goes to one of the food trucks and gets a chicken and rice situation.” Anything left over is for her son to keep (and spend) however he wants.
Still, Bethany says the system has gone wrong at times, particularly because her two oldest children have access to her credit card in addition to pocket money, supposedly for emergencies. She told me about a day when her 15-year-old, whose allowance is $30 a week, was at school for half a day, so she went out to lunch with her friends, got her nails done, and then grabbed frozen yogurt. She used Bethany’s credit card and not her own money. “So I thought, ‘Okay, we can’t do any of this.’ That was over $100 in one day. That’s crazy.” She also recently introduced a rule for Starbucks: it can only be consumed once a week. “It got completely out of control. There was a time when I looked at my credit card statement and thought, ‘Oh my God, you’ve been there three or four times this week.'”
For several parents I interviewed, the question of how much pocket money to give had less to do with their children’s wishes and more to do with unpacking the baggage of their own childhood. Some told me that as teenagers they never had enough money to shop with their friends and that they wanted their children to have a different experience. “I didn’t get any pocket money myself growing up in Queens in an immigrant family,” said Jay, a Manhattan father of a 16-year-old. “There was no such thing.” Jay began giving his son $100 a week when he was 13; he increased it to $200 a week last year. The money will help his son stay in step with his private school classmates, some of whom, Jay says, “have free access to their parents’ credit cards.” The money is enough to cover Starbucks runs and bowling trips, as well as occasional trips to the Hamptons with friends.
But it’s not just about keeping up appearances. For many teenagers, receiving pocket money was an opportunity to learn a lesson or two (and sometimes it is the very lesson that pocket money is traditionally intended to teach). Owen, the 12-year-old from Park Slope, told me he’s learning more and more about saving. “It’s definitely disappointing when I go home, count my money and then see that I didn’t win anything and spent it straight away all week. That’s kind of annoying,” he says. “But lately I’ve been really working on not spending money at the deli and I saved $20.22.” And many frugal teens and tweens are also discovering what it means to be generous. Jonathan Webb, the owner of Showroom Bakehouse, notices something about the kids who stop by his Park Slope store to buy Belgian waffles and pastel de nata: They’re very good tippers. “For $5.20,” he says, “they leave $6 left and tell the person working, ‘You can keep the rest.'”
Leiber says one of the most valuable learning experiences the scholarship provides is an early financial mistake — something Jay says his son is already getting a taste of. He recently withdrew $1,000 from his personal brokerage account to buy Pokémon Cards. “I didn’t agree with it,” Jay admits, “but he said, ‘This is the money you’re giving me as pocket change. I should be allowed to do whatever I want.'” The cards are still in Jay’s basement. His son claims that they are increasing in value; Jay remains pretty sure it was a big mistake.
The names of the parents and children in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.
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https://www.curbed.com/article/allowance-teen-new-york-city-boba-bakery-deli-spending.html
