#Diapers

1st Year Baby Costs: Diapers discusses how much it cost for diapers, wipes, and diapering supplies for baby's first year.

Now that he's potty trained (hooray!), we can do some calculations for every diaper that graced his bottom.

How much do diapers cost from birth to potty-trained? For us, ~$482. We used:

• 3,975 diapers
• 2,425 wipes

That's 12.12 cents/diaper change (diaper + wipes).

Baby #1 was potty trained at ~34 months, or 1,044 days. $482 for 34 months is just $14/month.

All the diapers and wipes we used, from birth to potty-training:

Total: $481.79 = $14.04/month = $3.23/week = $0.46/day

#Accuracy

I think these numbers are reasonably accurate, but definitely imperfect. I don't think the inaccuracies seriously affect the analysis though. For example:

• We had baby #2 before baby #1 was out of diapers, and we obviously shared wipes containers between them. Since baby #2 is a girl, we think we used a few more wipes per change on her (25% more than the 1,100 wipes we used for baby #1 in the first year), The number of wipes used for baby #1 was calculated by <number of wipes we used total> - <number of wipes estimated for baby #2>. Even if we're off by several hundred wipes, at 1.5 cents/wipe, I don't think this makes a huge difference.
• I didn't calculate every single diaper perfectly - we left a pack at Grandma & Grandpa's that baby #2 will use, and I estimated how many diapers are left from that pack.
• Inflation! 2022 in particular had a lot of inflation, and I bought some of these at 2019-2021 prices. The costs are likely higher now.

#Diapers Per Day

As a sanity check (the first time I did the analysis I missed a few boxes of diapers), it's interesting to calculate how many diapers per day we used.

We used 1,620 diapers in the first year. That means we used 2,355 diapers from 12-34 months.

#Not Diaper Costs

As discussed in the first year of baby's diapers cost article, we spent $74.05 on "Not Diapers", including:

• Diaper pail and liners
• Changing pads
• Changing pad covers
• Portable changing pad

After the 1st year, the only thing we purchased was generic brand diaper pail liners for $20.59; these lasted us for ~2 years.

This puts the total for birth-34 months at $94.64.

#What if we potty-trained earlier?

How much would we have saved by potty training earlier?

Using these assumptions (taken from above):

• All Size 4 diapers
• 3.47 diapers/day at 12.65 cents/diaper = $0.43/day
• 1.95 wipes/day at 1.49 cents/wipe = $0.03/day
• 30.41 days/month

This equates to $14.23 in savings per month (105 diapers/month).

In the US, potty training is common between 2-3 years, though some sources say you can potty train as early as 18 months. Here are some sample savings if you potty train earlier than 34 months:

#Conclusion

We would have spent $576.43 for all of baby #1's disposable diapering, including diapers, wipes, and "not diapers", from birth-34 months. That's $17/month - barely a blip in our budget. And we received ~$37.45 of free diapers, so actual out of pocket cost was $539 = $16/month.

That's about how much the Internet will say it costs for only diapers for a single year (see summary research here).

How did we spend so much less? Discussed in much more detail in the 1st Year Baby Costs: Diapers article, essentially, it's a combination of:

• Dramatically reduced per-diaper cost
• Using fewer than average diapers per day (without a reduction in health quality)
• Overestimation by The Internet

Overall, we found the cost of disposable diapers to be a perfectly reasonable, not stressful, expense in our parenting journey.