A shared holiday fund (a kitty) is a pot everyone pays the same amount into before the trip, used to cover the group’s shared costs. To size it: add up the shared expenses you expect, divide by the number of people, then add 15% headroom. One person looks after the pot, every expense gets logged, and whatever is left goes back to everyone at the end.
It is the opposite of the usual reflex, which is to let everyone pay as they go and settle up on the way home. A kitty moves the effort to the start of the trip, while everyone is still relaxed and in agreement. Most groups never get that far: according to an Experian survey from June 2025 of more than 700 travellers, only one friend group in four sets a budget before leaving. The other three improvise, which is usually where the tension starts.
What is a shared holiday fund?
It is money pooled before the trip, ring-fenced for the costs that concern everybody: the accommodation, the food shop, fuel, tolls, and activities you do as a group.
Not everything belongs in the kitty, and that needs saying out loud on day one. Left out: souvenirs, personal extras, the dinner three of you had while the rest were at the beach. The simple rule: if the expense does not benefit the whole group, it stays out of the kitty.
Those costs do not vanish, of course. They get settled separately, between the people involved, exactly as they would on a trip with no kitty at all. That is the subject of our guide on how to split travel expenses with friends, which covers working out who owes whom.
How much should everyone put in?
Three repeatable steps.
1. List the shared costs you can predict. Take five friends going to Spain for a week:
- House rental: £700
- Food shop and breakfasts: £400
- Fuel and tolls: £200
- Group activities: £200
Total: £1,500.
2. Divide by the number of people. £1,500 / 5 = £300 each.
3. Add 15% headroom. £300 + £45 = £345, rounded up to £350 each. The kitty starts at £1,750.
That headroom is not a detail. It is what absorbs the toll nobody remembered, the bottle bought for the hosts, the third load of laundry. Without it the kitty runs dry mid-trip and somebody has to pull out their card again, which brings back the exact problem you were trying to avoid.
Aim high rather than low: a surplus gets handed back at the end, whereas an empty pot means running a whip-round in the middle of your holiday.
Who manages the kitty, and how do you avoid friction?
One person, agreed before you leave. Split the job between several people and nobody knows what has been paid any more, which defeats the point entirely.
It is not a position of authority. Whoever holds the kitty does not judge the spending, they record it. Two conditions make the job bearable:
- Every expense gets logged as it happens, amount and what it was for. An expense written down the next day is an approximate expense, and an approximate expense is an argument waiting to happen.
- Everyone can see the balance at any time. This is the real tipping point. A kitty where only the treasurer knows the balance breeds more suspicion than having no kitty at all.
That is exactly what Banana Split automates: everyone follows the spending and the balance live on their phone, with nobody having to send round a summary. Have a look at the group expense tracking features to see how the group stays informed without anyone doing the admin.
Kitty, or everyone pays as they go?
Both work. It mostly comes down to the group.
A kitty suits groups where nobody wants to front large sums, where the group is big, or where budgets differ a lot between people: no one has to watch their bank balance during the trip.
Paying as you go is more flexible for a small group of close friends, where fronting £400 bothers nobody.
If you lean that way, everything happens on the way home, when you work out the repayments: our guide to splitting travel expenses walks through that method. Other expense sharing scenarios show which of the two approaches fits which situation.
Five friends each put £350 into the kitty. By the end of the trip, £1,585 has been spent. What happens to the remaining £165?
A kitty is not a budget to burn through, it is an advance. What is left still belongs to the people who paid in, in equal shares: £165 / 5 = £33 each. Rolling it over to a future trip is fine, but only if everyone agrees and everyone is actually coming.
What do you do with what is left?
You give it back, in equal shares. This is the step groups forget most often, and the one that leaves the worst aftertaste.
A kitty is an advance, not a budget to spend down. The £165 left in our example does not belong to the treasurer, nor to the group as some abstract entity: it belongs to the five people who paid in, £33 each.
Three options, to be settled explicitly before you head home:
- Pay everyone back: the cleanest, and the sensible default.
- Put it towards the last meal: a nice touch, as long as everyone is there and on board.
- Roll it over to the next trip: only works if the next trip genuinely exists and involves exactly the same people. When in doubt, pay it back.
The trap is “we’ll sort it out later”. Money that never finds its way back turns into a vague little debt nobody dares raise again, and it weighs far more than the £33 at stake.
Set up your kitty in a few minutes
A good kitty comes down to three things: a starting amount based on shared costs plus 15% headroom, one person in charge with a balance everybody can see, and the remainder handed back at the end.
Banana Split is free and does the tracking for you: each expense takes seconds to log, the whole group sees the kitty balance live, and splitting the leftovers is calculated automatically. You can download the app and create your trip in a minute, then invite your friends to join the group. You will be in the quarter of groups who sorted their budget before setting off.