Trip Affordability Calculator

Most trip calculators ask what you have saved and compare it against what the trip costs. It is the wrong comparison, and it is wrong in the direction that gets people into trouble. The balance in the account on the day you check includes the emergency fund, next term’s school fees, the insurance premium that falls due in March, and the money set aside for a parent’s procedure. None of that is available for a holiday, and a tool that counts it will clear a trip that quietly empties the buffer.

So this one asks the balance and then asks how much of it is already committed. On the domestic defaults, ₹1,20,000 of savings with ₹60,000 committed leaves ₹60,000 genuinely spendable — enough for a ₹1,02,000 family trip only because four months of saving at ₹25,000 gets you the rest. The same figures with the full balance counted would have said yes on day one.

EMIs sit in their own field for the same reason. Lumping them into monthly expenses hides the difference between the two: essentials can flex if a month gets tight, and an EMI cannot. ₹52,000 of essentials and ₹18,000 of EMIs against ₹95,000 of take-home leaves ₹25,000 a month, and that ₹25,000 is the only number that actually funds a trip.

Tax collected at source is money that leaves your account before you fly. It is not a fee — it comes back as credit against your income tax when you file, so across a full year it is a timing cost rather than a real one. But the trip has to be funded with it included, and it does not appear on the quote you were comparing against other quotes.

From 1 April 2026 there are two regimes, and the difference between them is the most useful thing on this page. An overseas tour package attracts a flat 2% with no threshold at all: ₹50,000 of package carries ₹1,000, and ₹3,15,000 carries ₹6,300. Everything else you remit yourself — hotel payments, forex, deposits — is free up to ₹10 lakh in the financial year and then charged at 20% on the excess.

Read those two together and the shape is odd. Booking your own trip is cheaper on cash flow than buying a package, right up until your year’s remittances cross ₹10 lakh, at which point the rate is ten times the package rate. On a ₹2,90,000 self-booked trip, the crossover sits at roughly ₹7,39,000 of other remittances in the same year. Below that the package costs you ₹5,800 more; above it the package is the cheaper route.

The 2% figure replaced a structure that charged 5% below ₹10 lakh and 20% above, so a large package got dramatically cheaper this year. If you are working from advice written before April 2026, the numbers in it are wrong by a wide margin.

“You cannot afford this” is a useless output. It tells you nothing you can act on, and people override it constantly by putting the deposit on a card and calling it solved. So when the numbers do not work, this tool reports the month they will.

On the package defaults you are ₹1,11,300 short at the six-month mark. At ₹25,000 a month from ₹60,000 of spendable savings, the trip is funded in month 11. That is not a refusal, it is a five-month delay — and a five-month delay is a decision a family can actually discuss, unlike an affordability score.

The same figures show the other two levers without needing separate advice. The shortfall is ₹18,550 a month if you want to close it by the original date, or ₹55,650 a head if the group shrinks. Whether it is easier to move the date, the headcount or the monthly spend is not something a calculator can know, but it can put all three in front of you in the same rupees.

What the tool will not do is pretend that a trip funded from a negative surplus is a trip. If essentials and EMIs already exceed take-home, nothing accumulates, the shortfall never closes, and the holiday is a loan whatever it is called at the time.

A trip total is hard to reason about. ₹3,21,300 is either fine or absurd depending on things a total does not tell you. ₹1,60,650 a head for two people on a foreign package is a figure you can immediately test against what friends paid, what the agent quoted last year, and what the same money would do somewhere else.

It also puts the group-size question in the right terms. Flights, visas and insurance are entered as one figure for the group precisely because they do not scale the way the per-head costs do, so adding a person to a domestic trip costs ₹22,000 rather than ₹25,500. On a foreign trip the reverse can be true once visas are involved. Splitting the two apart is the only way to see which.

The per-head figure is also where TCS becomes visible in a way people react to. ₹6,300 of tax on a package sounds like a rounding error; ₹3,150 a head on top of what you were quoted is a number someone will ask about before signing.

It does not model returns on the money you are saving, deliberately. Funds you need within a year belong in a sweep account or a short deposit, where six months of return on ₹25,000 a month is around ₹1,300 — small enough that including it would flatter the projection more than it would inform it. If your travel fund is somewhere it could fall in value before you travel, that is a larger problem and this projection does not see it.

It also assumes your surplus holds. A month with a medical bill or a car repair does not appear here, and the honest way to handle that is to leave the emergency fund in the committed field rather than to add a buffer to the trip cost. Exchange-rate movement between now and travel is not modelled either; on a six-month horizon a few percent either way is realistic on the forex portion.

TCS rates and thresholds come from the revision effective 1 April 2026, made by the Finance Act, 2026 read with the Income Tax Act, 2025. Rates change with budgets, so confirm the current figure with your bank or agent before a large booking — they are the ones collecting it. Nothing you type here leaves your browser, and nothing is stored between visits.