The point of pocket money is not really the money. It is the deciding. A child with £5 and a choice is learning something that a child handed a toy is not: that saying yes to one thing means saying no to another, and that the feeling of wanting something is different from the feeling of having chosen it.
Which is why the amount matters much less than people think, and the rules around it matter much more.
In this section
How much pocket money by age
What UK children actually receive each week, age by age, and how to work out a figure that fits your household.
Chores, jobs and earning it
Should pocket money be paid for work? The honest answer is: some of it, probably. Here is a way to split it.
Making a pocket money chart
A simple tracker you can draw on a piece of paper in five minutes, and why the writing-down part does the real work.
Three decisions to make before you start
1. How much, and how often
Weekly works better than monthly for younger children, because a week is a length of time they can actually feel. Around age 12 or 13, monthly starts to teach something extra: making an amount last when the next lot is a long way off. That is a genuinely useful skill and slightly painful to learn, which is rather the point.
2. Whether it is earned or given
Both approaches have a defence. Money that simply arrives teaches budgeting without the child having to earn adult approval first. Money that is earned teaches the connection between effort and reward. Many families do a mix — a small base amount that always arrives, plus extra available for bigger jobs. There is more on this, including which chores are usually treated as "just being part of the household".
3. What it is expected to cover
This is the one people skip, and it causes most of the arguments. If pocket money is meant to cover sweets, then a child asking you for sweets on top has misunderstood the deal — or, more likely, the deal was never spelled out. Write down what the money is for. Two lines is enough.
The bit that matters most
Let them spend it badly. A child who blows three weeks of savings on something disappointing has just had an extremely cheap lesson in a very safe place. Rescuing them from that — or saying "I told you so" — removes the entire benefit. The mistake is the education.
When to change the amount
Rises work best when they are attached to something: a birthday, a new school year, or a new responsibility being added to the list of what the money covers. That way the increase teaches something rather than just arriving. It also means the answer to "can I have more?" is a date rather than a negotiation, which is easier on everyone.