Allowance for 15 to 17 Year Olds
Published 2026-09-10 · All guides
At fifteen a teenager can usually earn money that has nothing to do with you, and that changes the arrangement whether you adjust it or not.
The allowance is no longer their income. It is one line in it. The question stops being “how much should I give” and becomes “what is this for now, given that they have their own.”
Do not cut it because they are earning
The instinct when a teenager starts earning is to reduce or stop the allowance. It is understandable and it usually backfires.
What the child learns from that is that earning money costs them money, which is close to the opposite of the intended lesson. A teenager who works a shift and ends the month no better off has been taught that work is pointless, and some of them stop working.
Keep the allowance as a base, unchanged, and let earnings be additive. If the total is now more than you think appropriate, change what the allowance has to cover rather than its size — which is the honest adjustment anyway, because their costs are genuinely rising at this age.
Hand over a real recurring bill
By sixteen the allowance should cover something with a due date and a consequence for missing it. A phone plan is the usual candidate: it recurs, the amount is fixed, and failure is immediate and entirely theirs.
This is qualitatively different from a spending category. A category runs out and they go without snacks. A bill is unpaid and something stops working, on a date, without negotiation. That is the last structural thing an allowance can teach, and there is no substitute for it.
Transfer the money for it and let them pay it. Not you paying it from their allowance — them paying it. The action matters more than the arithmetic.
Close the parent bank
The weekly interest was always a teaching device. At some point in this window it has to stop, because the alternative is worse: a seventeen-year-old still earning an impossible rate from their parent has learned a fact about the world that is not true.
Close it properly rather than letting it lapse:
- Say when, a few weeks ahead. A date, not “soon.”
- Explain why in real terms — that the rate was generous on purpose, that it was buying a demonstration, and that no institution pays anything like it. Show them the arithmetic if they want it; the kids savings calculator makes the final-week cost plain, and by now it is a number they can understand.
- Open a real account together, with them doing the talking where possible.
- Move the balance across. All of it, including the interest you paid, without conditions. It was theirs.
Then let them discover the real rate. It will be disappointing, and the disappointment is the last and most useful part of the whole exercise: the reason compounding matters in the real world is not the rate, it is the time, and they now have more of that than anyone.
The conversation that replaces it
Once the jar is a real account, the thing worth talking about is no longer saving. It is the two mechanisms they are about to meet.
The first is compound interest running against them. A credit card, a buy-now-pay-later checkout, an overdraft. The same arithmetic they have been watching in their favour for a decade, pointed the other way, and they are the rare teenager equipped to recognise it on sight.
The second is that income is not the same as money kept. A first wage feels enormous and disappears anyway. The habit you spent ten years installing — splitting money at the moment it arrives, before it becomes available — is the only reliable defence, and it transfers directly from three jars to a bank account.
What success looks like
Not a large balance. A large balance at seventeen is mostly evidence of how much you gave them.
Success is that they split their own pay without being asked, they know what their subscriptions cost annually, they have declined something they wanted because the number did not work, and they have recovered from at least one purchase they regret. All four of those are habits, and habits are the only part of this that survives contact with an adult income.
Where this started
The whole arrangement, from the first coin onwards: 6 to 8 · 9 to 11 · 12 to 14 · setup · why weekly interest.