#Diapers

"Diapers are so expensive!!" Most new parents hear this soooo many times when they're preparing for their first baby. If there's one thing every baby needs - it's diapers: this is one baby expense you can't really skip.

But how much do they really cost? Here's what the Internet has to say about disposable¹ diaper costs in a baby's first year:

Some of these numbers are quite large! And they don't even include wipes. We (two adults) spent $75/month on restaurants (mostly takeout) in 2020 - did our diaper spending really equal that of our eating out splurges? What did we really spend on diapering in our first year?

How much do diapers cost in the first year? For us, ~$194. We used 1,620 diapers and 1,100 wipes at a cost of 12 cents/(diaper + wipes). $194/year is just $16/month, or $4/week.

This is way lower than most estimates... But why?

#Diapers: the first year

I tracked² that we used ~1,620 diapers in the first year, or ~4.45/day. This includes diapers purchased or given to us. More on this later, but this number passes a basic sanity check for our little guy - we probably go through about 4-5 diapers a day now, at 18 months (and have for quite some time), but newborns need diapers almost every time they feed (~6-8 times/day).

Total: $194.44 = $16.20/month = $3.74/week

If you're curious about how much diapers and wipes cost from birth until potty training, see the birth to potty-trained diaper costs article.

#Reducing diaper costs

#Use fewer diapers?

Apparently 1,620 diapers in the first year is fewer than most places on the Internet suggest: we used 55-80% of the estimated necessary diapers.

• Am I bad at counting?
• Is our baby just a wonder-child? Or are we mistreating our son by letting him sit in his diapers too long?
• Is the Internet overestimating?

Maybe a little bit of all of those.

#Bad at counting?

I didn't keep incredibly detailed track of all of the free diapers we received, but I don't think I missed over 400 free diapers. Maybe with baby #2 I'll keep better track :)

#Our baby is a wonder child?

Every baby is different. Our little guy:

1. Doesn't complain about his diaper being wet/dirty and only occasionally gets diaper rash (usually while sleeping).
2. Started sleeping long stretches fairly early (3-4 months), and babies soil fewer diapers when they're sleeping. Note that this site suggests changing diapers every 3 hours (or on-demand, which we definitely do for stinky or noticeably wet diapers). He's slept 10+ hours/night since he was 4 months old, so that's only 4-5 3 hour periods per day. So it's not crazy.
3. Is ~20th percentile for weight, so even at 18 months he was 23 lbs - solidly in the size 3 diapers.
4. Has a regular amount of bowel movements: at least daily (more when he was younger).

#The Internet is overestimating?

While we may have lower diaper usage than many families, 3,000 diapers is 8.2 diapers per day and while that may have been realistic for the first few months, I can't imagine using that many per day after he started solid foods. I never saw any direct source data for these recommended ranges, so it's hard to know where they come from. My best guess is from diaper manufacturers, like this Pampers Chart, which suggests between 1,900-2,900 diapers in the first year. Diaper manufacturers do have incentive to encourage more diaper changes per day, so I don't consider it particularly reliable.

Some daycares have hard-and-fast rules, e.g., diaper gets changed every 2 hours, no matter what. If the baby is at daycare for 8 hours a day, that's at least 4 diaper changes (plus on-demand), plus a few at home, so I can see how it adds up quickly.

So what do other sources say?

• Mixed Up Money kept more detailed notes than me, and changed 2,057 diapers in the first year.
• Based on reasonable calculations from My Mom's a Nerd, she would expect 2,490 diapers in the first year.

An informal poll of my mom friends³:

• 4 said ~5/day (1,825 in 365 days)
• 1 said 6-7/day (2,190-2,555 in 365 days)
• 1 said 7-8/day (2,555-2,920 in 365 days)
• 1 said 5-8/day (newborn 10+)
• "We do a diaper change with each feeding (she has never cared if she's wet or not). So as a newborn 8 diapers a day, now 5 a day."
• 1 kept a spreadsheet:
  • 324 Newborn (31.5 days)
  • 1,789 Size 1 (243 days)
  • 834 Size 2 (90.5 days)
  • Total for year 1: 2,947 diapers

#What if my baby really does need that many diapers?

So how much would we have spent if we used more diapers?

Assuming a base cost of $196 for the first 1,620 diapers (as we used), plus 11 cents/diaper + 1.5 cents/wipe/diaper for additional diapers:

So... our low usage helps, but even if we used 3,000 diapers in the first year, it doesn't explain the roughly 2x gap between $31/month and the typically estimated $75/month.

#Wipes

As we (apparently) are a bit stingy with our diapers, we are also stingy with our wipes: most wet diapers don't get a wipe if things aren't pink; most dirty diapers get 1-2⁴. There are obvious blowout "3 wiper" exceptions (or emergency baths), and I imagine that with a baby girl instead of a boy, we'd wipe for every wet diaper, not just the dirty ones.

I remember seeing a mom at mom's group use 5 wipes for what I would have deemed a "1 wiper", but to each his own - maybe her baby gets diaper rash really easily so it's worth the tradeoff. This mom assumes 10(!!) wipes per dirty typical diaper, which seems crazy to me - I've never used more than 5 wipes for the worst of blowouts (protip: wipe with the diaper to the large bits off, then fold wipes on themselves to get several wipes from each wipe). If it's that messy, we just do an emergency bath :)

Quotes from some mom friends:

• "On average the dirty ones get 3 wipes. Wet ones usually only get one."
• "We use 2 wipes for a wet (one for baby and one for the diaper cream paddle). Probably 5 for a dirty diaper but it was more when she was younger and they were more runny. We are not efficient wipe users. We do use cream every time. She got a tiny little rash once and now we figure better safe than sorry."

But wipes aren't that expensive (~1.5 cents/wipe) so we're not really saving that much here. The biggest benefits to using fewer wipes is not needing to change the wipes container as often, and therefore avoiding the "no more wipes in the container mid-diaper change" problem.

#Per diaper costs

#Buying in bulk

Every diaper purchase came down to calculating the per diaper cost. I typically aim for ~10-11 cents/diaper.

To repeat advice you read everywhere on the internet - buy in bulk! In many, but not all cases, buying the biggest box you can is the cheapest. However, occasionally a smaller box is cheaper per diaper, or roughly equivalent, so it's worth doing the math.

But of course, make sure you're going to be able to use all the diapers in the box before sizing up. In a few cases, the slight difference in cost per diaper of a small pack vs. a huge box is worth the flexibility. Our Size 2 diapers ended up being the most expensive per diaper because we bought a couple smaller packs to get us to the next size, but probably saved us $$ in the long run.

We did try to plan ahead - if we were nearing the end of a size, we'd try the next size up a couple of times to see if it would work or be leak-city so we could decide if we would be able use an entire unopened box, a small pack, or just move up a bit early. The weight ranges on the diaper sizes are just guidelines - reasonably good ones, but you know your baby best.

#Target sales

Target has some unique discounts that we were able to take advantage of with a little, but not a lot of, work - no coupon clipping or online shopping extensions necessary.

• Target's REDcard gives you 5% off every purchase. Target also runs 5-10% off gift card sales (1-2x/year in 2020 and 2021, at least).
• Target often (every couple of months) runs deals for "spend $100 on diapers/baby essentials, get a $20 gift card". This makes any diaper purchased at Target much cheaper: without REDCard ~20% off, depending on how close you can get to $100; with REDCard, the calculation is more complicated, but it's more than 20% off. Occasionally (2x/year or so), they do a $30 gift card for $100.

Most mainstream diaper brands are sold at Target. You can also easily return them if you don't open a box.

This requires your financial/storage space situation to allow for buying diapers several weeks (months?) before you might need them. The upside: we've never been close to running out of diapers - we're always buying a few weeks/months ahead of time, so there's no fighting about who was supposed to remember to buy them. I get a notification from the Target app about the $20 off $100 deal, then check our stash and replenish as necessary.

#Diaper brands

There are quite a few (disposable) diaper choices. Wirecutter has an excellent analysis of many diaper brands, and concluded that Up&Up, Parent's Choice, and Pampers were worth their value, with Pampers earning the "Upgrade pick" for better-performing but also more expensive. They also concluded that eco-friendly diapers perform as well as Up&Up/Parent's Choice, but are 2-3x more expensive. My Mom's a Nerd also has a fairly comprehensive disposable diaper brand comparison.

Our philosophy, as it is with many regular purchases, is to try a cheaper brand, and if it works, great, but if it doesn't, consider spending a little bit more for a higher quality product (store brand Oreos = bad; store brand oatmeal = fine). We started with Up&Up diapers, and while there were some blowouts, we also had a few Pampers samples/gifts and they didn't seem to reduce the frequency of blowouts. In fact, we used a gifted box of Mickey Mouse themed Huggies, and anecdotally noticed more blowouts (granted, we were in Disney World, so lots of things were different). And our baby boy didn't have diaper rash with Up&Up - so they worked for us.

For the sake of comparison, if we had used a different brand, how much would we have paid for diapers? I checked prices from Target, Walmart, and Costco in March 2021, including any click-to-clip manufacturer's coupons and discounting all diapers/wipes you can buy at Target at 20%. Details in this spreadsheet. Efficiency is Everything also has a cost/diaper analysis, although he doesn't discount Target diapers, so I found it less useful.

Costs for diapers and wipes, using actual amounts of sizes we used in the first year:

Obviously, if you use more diapers, the cost/diaper ends up affecting your total cost more than it would have for us.

Takeaways:

1. We saved $150 by using Up&Up diapers in 1 year, with no extra effort over buying Pampers from Target.
2. If you want to use eco-friendly diapers, you should decide if it's worth $200-300/year to do so.

#Not diapers

To properly handle diaper changes, there are a few things that make life easier. These don't seem be be included in other sites' estimates, so they're in a section by themselves here. We equipped a secondary changing station that we used for baby's first ~4 months, so not all of these were necessary for a minimalist diaper changing operation.

A notable exclusion is diaper cream. We got a couple of free sample tubes for creating registries at places like Target and Walmart, and we're still (2 years in) using those samples. Your pediatrician may also have free samples laying around. But diaper rash cream isn't really that expensive either - the brand our pediatrician recommends, Balmex, is $4 for 2 oz (cheaper per ounce if your baby needs a giant tub of it). We also used (cheaper, less gross) petroleum jelly when our baby's bottom was tinged a bit pink and we were worried about it turning into something worse.

Total: $74.05

These could have cost us much more (see the "new cost" column), likely $200-$275 (instead of ~$75 we actually spent) but buying used and getting some hand-me-downs saved us $$ (60+%).

#Conclusion

Including the costs of "not diapers", we would have spent $268.49 for baby's first year of disposable diapering. We received ~$37.24 of free diapers, so actual out of pocket cost was $231.

The birth to potty-trained diaper costs article discusses all costs for one baby/toddler's diapers, wipes, and diapering supplies.

We spent a lot less on diapers in the first year than most estimates suggest ($60-700 less). Our little guy apparently went through way fewer diapers than most infants (but was still very happy). But there was also a big difference in cost per diaper than most estimates (~11 cents/diaper vs. ~20 cents/diaper), mostly due to using the generic brand and shopping in bulk at 20% off sales.

Overall, diapering is an area where if your baby tolerates generic diapers well (and they don't lead to excessive blowouts), you can safely budget $30/month for diapers/wipes.