How much does it cost to travel around the world?

A guide for long-term travelers

Everyone’s spending habits are different. That’s why we work with travelers individually (and as groups) to build budgets personalized to their own spending habits and desired travel style.

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All that being said, it really helps to have a benchmark when you’re assessing if long-term travel is feasible in the first place. Especially if you’re considering traveling very long-term as a digital nomad (without income lined up yet), clarity is empowering.

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This is Part II of our guide for long-term travel budgeting. (Part I has our budget template, which you can download for free). As usual, it's massive, so we've broken it into sections for you:

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• How Much We Spent While Traveling around the World

  • How much we spent in Europe while traveling

  • How much we spent in East & Southern Africa while traveling

  • How much we spent in Southeast Asia (x-Singapore) while traveling

  • How much we spent in Singapore while traveling

  • How much we spent in South America while traveling

• How much does it cost to travel for “X” months?

  • Here’s how much it costs to travel for 3 months

  • Here’s how much it costs to travel for 6 months

  • Here’s how much it costs to travel for 12 months

• How to Estimate Your Full Time Travel Expenses – Accurately

• How much money you’ll spend on accommodation

• How much money you’ll spend on transportation

• How much money you’ll spend on local transportation

• How much money you’ll spend on food

• How much money you’ll spend on activities

• Additional costs you might overlook

• Why you need a miscellaneous budget

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I’m very open about what we spent when we traveled around the world for a year. And, luckily, I tracked our expenses very granularly – from what we spent on street food in western Europe to how much public transit cost in Spain to what our travel insurance cost.

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I’m sharing below our actual expenses for every country and broad region we went to so you can reference them as you assess costs for your own journey. Southern and East Africa aren’t broken down by country because we joined a touring company, so many of our expenses were consolidated, but I’m highlighting in that section which experiences were particularly expensive for reference.

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A few notes on my own spending habits so you can assess how your travel style would compare:

• I’m what you would call a bougie backpacker. That means I don’t often stay in a hostel dorm, but I also don’t stay at the Ritz. For the most part, I stayed in private rooms in Airbnbs.

• I cook when it will save me a lot of money (e.g., in Europe and South America) but not when it won’t (in Southeast Asia).

• I traveled in 2023, so my expenses will be slightly understated in today’s terms given inflation – though Argentina will be meaningfully understated given the hyper-inflationary environment it’s been going through.

• I’m very financially savvy. I know how to find a good deal. I maximized credit card points before our trip to use them on major international flights and on our most expensive accommodations, which brought down our costs a bit.

• The expenses I’m noting below are on a per-person/per-day basis.

 

I can’t guarantee you’ll spend what I spent! You might spend more, and you might spend less. (For what it’s worth, I know people who’ve spent significantly less than this.) That’s why I think it’s SO valuable to work with someone 1:1 to figure out what YOUR TRIP will cost. But hopefully these numbers give you a helpful benchmark.

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How Much We Spent While Traveling around the World

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How much we spent in Europe while traveling: $133

• How much we spent in Italy  while traveling: $109/day

• How much we spent in Ireland while traveling: $190/day

• How much we spent in the UK while traveling: $249/day (high because of an injury that resulted in expensive Ubers instead of public transit)

• How much we spent in Spain while traveling: $157/day

 

How much we spent in Morocco while traveling: $54

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How much we spent in East & Southern Africa while traveling: $132

• Notes on particularly expensive endeavors:

  • Victoria Falls - adventure activities (sky diving, bungee jumping, white water rafting, etc.) are all $100 each

  • Okavango Delta - our safari charged us a few hundred dollars to include a 2-night stay in the wild here

 

How much we spent in Southeast Asia (x-Singapore) while traveling: $78

• How much we spent in Vietnam while traveling: $75/day

• How much we spent in Laos while traveling: $73/day

• How much we spent in Cambodia while traveling: $94/day

• How much we spent in Thailand while traveling: $91/day

• How much we spent in Indonesia while traveling: $99/day

  • How much we spent in Bali while traveling: $201/day

• How much we spent in the Philippines while traveling: $59/day BUT most of our accommodation was paid by gift card, so this is modestly understated

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How much we spent in Singapore while traveling: $148/day BUT we paid for our hotel using points, so this excludes the cost of accommodation

 

How much we spent in South America while traveling: $76/day

• How much we spent in Patagonia while traveling: $215/day

• How much we spent in Argentina while traveling: $53/day

 

How much does it cost to travel for “X” months?

 

There’s one other way to look at what your trip around the world will cost that is simpler – and it might help you if you don’t know where you’re going to travel yet but do want to get a sense of what’s possible. In this approach, we outline moderate costs (same cost profile noted above) by bucketing countries into three categories – “cheap,” “mid-range,” and “expensive” countries.

 

One note – These estimates are just that – estimates! They DON’T include the long-haul flight to/from these locations (since that will vary based on where you live) and they don’t include expenses beyond day-to-day travel expenses. (For example, they don’t include what you might spend on a storage unit.)

 

These numbers all refer to costs we’d expect for one traveler. If you travel with someone, your costs won’t double, assuming you share a hotel room or Airbnb.

 

Finally, here are some examples for what countries are defined as cheap, mid-range, and expensive:

• Cheap Countries – Vietnam, Morocco

• Mid-Range Countries – Italy, Indonesia

• Expensive Countries – UK, Kenya

 

Here’s how much it costs to travel for 3 months:

• “Cheap” Countries: $5,400 - $9,000

• “Mid-Range” Countries: $7,200 - $10,800

• “Expensive” Countries: $9,900 - $13,500

 

Here’s how much it costs to travel for 6 months:

• “Cheap” Countries: $10,800 - $18,000

• “Mid-Range” Countries: $14,400 - $21,600

• “Expensive” Countries: $19,800 - $27,000

 

Here’s how much it costs to travel for 12 months:

• “Cheap” Countries: $21,900 - $36,500

• “Mid-Range” Countries: $29,200 - $43,800

• “Expensive” Countries: $40,150 - $54,750

 

How to Estimate Your Full Time Travel Expenses – Accurately

One important note – accurately forecasting your travel expenses takes times. It’s time that’s well worth the effort, because a bad budget can be catastrophic for your trip. You might overlook some of the biggest expenses in your trip!

 

If you’re not keen to do this yourself, you can always hire Travelries to do this for you, but don’t simply decide to skip this entirely (or do it poorly) because it’s a tour de force.

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Either way, this is 100% worth the effort it takes.

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Your main travel expenses will break down into five categories:

• Accommodation

• Transit in between cities and countries

• Transit within cities

• Food

• Activities

 

I’ll walk through the best ways to accurately forecast your spend in each of these categories below. Afterwards, we’ll talk about the other expenses that you might overlook – like monthly bills at home, bank fees, exchange rate costs, medical expenses, and a lot more.

 

How much money you’ll spend on accommodation

 

Forecasting here depends on what kinds of places are you going to stay in and your length of stay. (The latter matters because for slow travel, long-term stays can provide automatic discounts and enable you to negotiate big discounts.) If you’re comfortable staying in hostel dorms, I recommend consulting the www.hostelworld.com website to see what approximate prices are for the type of bed/room you’d like at the appropriate time of year.

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If you’d rather stay in private rooms or your own private apartment, I recommend consulting sites like AirBNB, Expedia, or your favorite hotel chain’s website. The latter two will often be more expensive than the former. (We stayed mostly in private rooms on AirBNB, often paying less than we would have to stay in a private room in a hostel.)

As you review prices online, don’t simply look at the cheapest rate and plop that into your budget. Filter for the amenities you want. Do you need wifi? A kitchen? Would you rather have free cancelation? Then quickly skim through the resulting options. Would you be willing to stay in those locations? If not, keep tweaking until you find options where you would actually stay. When you do, add an approximate average (you can eyeball this) as your budgeted accommodation spend for that city.

 

One very important note – It’s critical to look in the right season. If you’re going to travel in June, don’t look at travel dates in October just because the website defaults to that date range. This can massively impact the prices you’ll see in hyper-seasonal areas like Southeast Asia or areas with dramatic swings in tourist seasons like Italy.

 

How much money you’ll spend on transportation

 

I break transit into two categories: 1) between cities/countries and 2) within a city. In other words, if we were leaving Siem Reap to go to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, that would fall in the former category, but if we were simply taking taxis in Phnom Penh to get around in our day-to-day that would fall into the latter category. I break these into two different categories because they are very different; the former is generally far more expensive than the latter.

To estimate transit costs between cities and countries, I highly recommend starting with Rome2Rio’s website. This website provides the most accurate information we’ve found about transportation costs all over the world. In many cases, their website will actually give you links to the actual local transit company’s website to book directly. (FYI, the two areas that I’ve noticed that Rome2Rio provides particularly inaccurate information are in flight costs and rideshare prices. It’s always good practice to double check the quotes against the source information.)

If there are instances in which you expect to fly, I recommend looking at GoogleFlights as a starting resource. You may not actually use GoogleFlights to book (international travel sites are often cheaper), but it’s a helpful guide with lots of flexible tools to explore your options.

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For rideshare, you can defer to BudgetMyTrip for a benchmark on costs, though don’t expect it to be 100% accurate.

One word of caution in this section – it’s very easy to decide at this point that a flight is too expensive and therefore you’ll take the bus. If you are the kind of person who would never under any circumstances take a bus because it’s cheaper than a flight at home, please be cautious in assuming you will do so on this trip. This could be a very costly mistake down the line if you end up booking flights regularly instead of taking 20-30 hour buses.

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How much money you’ll spend on local transportation

 

This was the hardest for us to estimate but ultimately the least important because we mostly walked wherever we were going. Plus, using public transport regularly allowed us to keep these costs very low in general. We used BudgetMyTrip’s website to add in a daily budget for getting around the city via taxi, train, etc. However, our budgets were way overstated, perhaps because we move slowly and also because we walked a lot.

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My recommendation to you is to read blogs about how people get around in the different places you’re going. If, for example, the subway is a safe and reliable option, you can budget for a daily spend of 4x the subway cost.

One word of caution in this section – many tourists come to southeast Asia and rent motorcycles. If you have no experience on a motorcycle, in my opinion, you have no business getting on one internationally. Moreover, renting vehicles of any kind will very quickly eat into your budget. Whatever your decision, please know that accidents do happen, and they are far worse to deal with when you are abroad.

 

How much money you’ll spend on food

 

This is the part of your budget you are most likely to screw up. I know, from experience.

 

To budget for food, we got initial rough estimates from BudgetMyTrip. However, these tended to undershoot the actual costs we incurred. This was predominantly because we ended up eating out far more often than we planned. We wanted to experience the local cuisine, so we often found ourselves at restaurants instead of cooking. We also avoided street food at a number of locations because we were worried about food sanitation.

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Originally, we’d also planned and budgeted to cook most places we traveled on our own, however, we realized later on that that would be impossible. We couldn’t find affordable places to stay that had kitchens, so our choices were a) eat out as cheaply as we could or b) make ramen noodles using the kettle. We chose option A because we had room in our budget from under-spending on transit.

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You can learn from our mistakes though.

 

Unlike different activities that you can choose to do or not do in a particular location, you have to eat. This is a part of your budget worth padding generously.

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My recommendation for accurately forecasting your spend is to use Google Maps to look at well-rated restaurants you’d be likely to go to in each of the places on your itinerary. Often, you can see pictures of the menu on the Google reviews. Check out a few and multiply that meal cost by 3 meals a day and then by the number of people you’re budgeting for. (One caveat, if you’re traveling to places like Argentina or Turkey where recent inflation has driven prices up significantly, be sure to look for recent menu prices and add a significant buffer for inflation.)

You can still assume you’re going to cook while you travel so long as you can prove to yourself that you can find affordable accommodation that will allow you access to a fridge and kitchen. We cooked through Europe almost every day, in Africa we had a “cooking” chore that we were rotated into regularly as part of how our safari was planned, and in Argentina we cooked most meals in our AirBNB’s teeny-tiny kitchen.

If you plan to drink alcohol during your travels, be sure to budget for that as well and know that the cost won’t be insignificant, especially if you are drinking in places where most people don’t because it will be in shorter supply.

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How much money you’ll spend on activities

 

There is so much you can do for free, all over the world. For budget-friendly travel, I highly recommend over-indexing on free activities. However, there will still be plenty of things you may not want to miss that cost a pretty penny.

 

Here’s how I recommend approaching this:

• Set a daily budget you’re comfortable with by country (e.g., $20/day in cheap countries and $50/day in expensive countries).

• Look at travel blogs or sites like TripAdvisor to figure out what the overlap is between what society has decided are the “must do” things in any given location and the things you actually want to do. Then look up what those actually cost (note the price on TripAdvisor is likely more expensive than what you can find locally) and add that into your activities budget. Even in the cheaper areas of the world, you’ll find some “must do” activities exceed your budget. To get a great guide in Angkor Wat, for example, cost $190, but it was well-worth it.

 

One of the best ways to make sure you’re comprehensively capturing all the “must-do” activities you won’t want to miss out on once you’re traveling is to talk to travelers who’ve been to your destination before. Though time-consuming (unless you know someone who’s done long-term travel themselves and can speak to a huge number of locations personally – oh wait, that’s us!), this is well worth the effort. You’ll learn first-hand what other travelers felt was absolutely worth it and was a total waste of money so you can plan accordingly.

 

Additional costs you might overlook

 

Your long term travel budget should include more than these categories. Full time travel means you’ll probably incur some expenses at home you won’t want to overlook.

 

Your budget for your sabbatical needs to include costs you will incur at home or that aren’t directly related to day-to-day costs too. The main reason for this is that they can really add up. All in all, about 15% of our total budget was devoted to these kinds of costs, so don’t ignore them! They can be tens of thousands of dollars!

 

Below is what I recommend budgeting for in addition to day-to-day travel expenses. Note though that you will need to tailor this to your individual circumstances. Taking a look at your normal budget or your credit card statements will be your best shot at catching expenses you may be overlooking. I’ve tried to make this list as exhaustive as it can be, but there are likely things missing specific to your circumstances, so be diligent.

• Storage unit – Storage unit rental fees, at least in our experience, seem to be designed to go up massively once you’ve signed on the dotted line and moved all of your belongings in. The companies that rent them know what a pain it would be to change your storage unit because of a rate hike. You will need to budget accordingly. Read reviews for whatever storage unit company you plan to use to understand what rate hikes have been like. If you can’t figure it out reliably, take your current rate, multiply by the months you’re traveling, and double the total cost as a conservative estimate of how much it might cost you in the end. We rented our storage unit initially for $130, and our final monthly rate was $220 – and this was lower than it would have been because I regularly called to renegotiate rate hikes down.

• Storage unit insurance – Yup, that costs extra! Get a quote and budget accordingly.

• Credit card fees – Especially if you are a travel hacker taking advantage of sign-up bonuses, you need to make sure you’ve budgeted for credit card fees. Better yet, cancel credit cards you don’t plan on using anymore.

• Travel vaccines – You may be traveling to destinations that require proof of vaccines that you don’t currently have, like Yellow Fever, for example. You’ll need to get these vaccines, and you may choose to get additional ones (e.g., Japanese Encephalitis, Rabies, etc.)
  
  In the US, many health insurance policies do not cover the cost of travel vaccines, and they can add up to several thousand dollars. Call local travel clinics (and talk to your doctor) to understand what these will costs. The local travel clinic (or your doctor) can guide you, based on your itinerary, as to what vaccines you should get and then you can get cost estimates. In the US, it is worth calling several clinics, because the prices will vary, sometimes significantly. You may also find it is cheaper to get these vaccines while you are traveling. We got ours at our first stop in Italy and saved $1,000 versus the cheapest option we found in the US.

• Phone bill – If you are staying on your current phone plan, you’ll certainly need to keep paying that bill.

• International Sims/E-Sims – Companies like Ubigi and Airolo allow you to purchase E-Sims. This is a great way to make sure you stay connected without issue in a new place, allowing you to avoid dealing with finding the local store or “the guy” who has physical sim cards to buy. It’s easy enough to budget for these – simply search for how much e-Sims cost in each of your planned destinations (in the Ubigi or Airolo apps) and add up the total. E-Sims were generally more expensive in our experience, so if you plan on buying physical Sims, you can still use the cost of E-Sims as a good, conservative estimate.

• Car Insurance – You can likely negotiate a lower car insurance rate based on putting your car in storage, lower expected mileage, or by removing drivers from the policy. You’ll need to talk to your insurance company to determine what’s feasible.

• Taxes – If you’re traveling during tax season, you may have a tax bill to pay. If you’re expecting a refund, you can do what we did and add it to the trip budget if you so choose.

• Travel Insurance – For long-term travel, you need travel insurance. You can currently find long-term policies through SafetyWing or World Nomads. Depending on what you buy, these packages will include coverage for things like medical treatment, accidents, emergency evacuations, lost or delayed luggage, and trip interruption. If you ever read an insurance policy through line-by-line, this is the one to choose! Some things are noticeably omitted in policies, and you’ll need to know if things like scuba diving, riding ATVs, or hiking above certain altitudes are covered or not so you can plan accordingly. (For reference, our policy for a year cost about $1,200 in 2023.)

• Visa Fees – Fun fact, these are subject to change! What isn’t in life, really? You can look these up online for your planned itinerary and sum up the current total, with a small buffer. The US State Department has an “info page” for every country they recognize that includes entry and exit regulations. There, you can see where to get accurate information about applying for a visa and can track down the cost of each one. Though tedious, this is worth doing! Some visas are $100 or more!

• Property Costs – If you are a homeowner, you should know and plan for the costs related to property ownership – the mortgage payment, HOA fees, taxes, repair costs if you’re renting it out, etc.

• Subscriptions – Do you have a Netflix subscription you don’t want to cancel? Spotify? Amazon Prime? Costco? If you don’t cancel these, be sure to include them in your budget. Don’t forget to check the app store on your phone for any apps on recurring subscriptions (like Strava or Alltrails) that you might be paying for.

• Presents – Are you going to order gifts for people back home for their birthdays or for the holidays? These can really add up, so be sure to give a good estimate for what this might cost you in the budget.  (Pro-tip: buy these before you leave, wrap them, and mail your loved ones boxes filled with wrapped presents that say “do not open until X date” on them. It’ll be adorable, and they’ll be incredibly impressed with your planning.)

• Souvenirs – Don’t be silly like we were an assume you’re never going to buy souvenirs. Have a guilty-free souvenir budget set aside so that you can purchase the occasional trinket without feeling like you’re breaking your own rules.

• Shipping – If you are planning on shipping gear, souvenirs, or anything else home during your trip, you need to budget for it in advance. Why? It’s going to run you a few hundred bucks, even if it only weighs a few pounds. We shipped one piece of art and a box of gear back and spent about $600 total. If you plan to ship anything back home, set aside a healthy budget for it ($500-$1,000), which (roughly) will allow you to ship 3-4 medium-size boxes home… though these costs will vary dramatically based on location, timing, box size, etc.

• Medicine – If I could do our trip over, I would for sure have had money set aside for medicine from the pharmacy. Because not all medicines are available everywhere (and because some are not over-the-counter in certain countries), you may find that you “stock up” on medications in some places. This can lead to a big bill in one country that isn’t really reflective of what your daily spending is like in that country. You may want to have a separate budget set aside for filling up the mini-pharmacy of over-the-counter medicine you’ll travel with to address regular ailments (colds, stomach bugs, diarrhea, etc.)

• Clothing & Gear – If you are planning on buying any new gear or clothing abroad (perhaps because you’ll be traveling through quite a few different climates and don’t want to carry gear/clothing for all of the climates the whole time), you need to set aside money for those expenses in advance. Even if you don’t plan to buy any gear or clothing, I would still keep this in the budget. You may find that gear you’ve bought for the trip isn’t functional in the way you need, or things may break, or clothes may start to get really worn out after regular wear.

• Pet Care – If you’re leaving beloved pets with family or friends, be sure to budget for their food, vet costs, and anything else you plan to cover for whomever is caring for your furry friend(s).

• Password Manager – Keep your data safe! If you’re using one already, budget accordingly for the subscription.

• Mail Forwarding – USPS charges a fee to forward your mail!

• Returning Home Budget – We decided to look for jobs during the latter half of our trip so that we could come back to the US and start new jobs right away. However, there are other ways to do this. We met some people who didn’t plan to look until they were back on US soil, and that’s fine too. If you do that, I’d recommend budgeting accordingly for several months of life back in the US before you start work. Of course, for this you can rely on whatever you’ve spent historically in the US, adjusted for any compromises you’re making (e.g., living with family), in order to save on costs until you find a job.

• Miscellaneous budget -- This is exactly as it sounds, it’s a budget for whatever you didn’t think of when you were creating your budget initially. Even if you consider all of the cost buckets above, I can virtually guarantee you’ll face other expenses you couldn’t have anticipated or planned for. For this reason, I absolutely recommend including a miscellaneous budget. This way, when unplanned expenses come up, you won’t have to worry about having to change your itinerary or reduce costs somewhere else in your trip, because you’ve already planned for the unplan-able.
  
  If you’re financially savvy with lots of practice budgeting, you can likely build in a smaller miscellaneous budget (5% of the budget is my recommendation). If this is one of your first rodeos with complicated budgeting, set a bigger one (15% of the budget is my recommendation).

 

Why you need a miscellaneous budget

 

Just to drive home the point that sometimes you can’t plan for everything and a miscellaneous budget is a big value-add, here are some of the things that we did not budget for:

• Exchange rate fluctuations made our safari cost just under $1k more than we’d budgeted for initially.

• We decided we wouldn’t buy souvenirs on the trip. Then, on the trip, we decided to buy souvenirs. Big shock! We spent about $1,500 on souvenirs that we didn’t plan on initially, mostly because we got a ton of new clothing custom-made in Hoi An, Vietnam.

• We decided we wouldn’t ship anything home and would simply carry everything the whole time. Then a medical issue made that impossible! I sprained my back, and we to carry less stuff with us since my husband had to carry everything . So, we shipped things home twice for the price of about $600 we got new backpacks so that it was easier for him to carry everything.

• Because I sprained my back, I needed to buy of pain medication. We expected to go to the pharmacy occasionally, but we did not expect or budget for having to buy enough ibuprofen, Tylenol, heating pads, massage tools, extra pillows, and anti-inflammatory cream to get through 2 months of camping in Africa (PS – all purchased based on a doctor’s recommendation I consulted in Ireland, as we were traveling.)

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The unexpected will happen. Budget accordingly!