The cost of baby nappies

In this article, we cover the cost of baby nappies and how you can reduce that cost.

Babies wee about every one to three hours, that’s about 1 litre everyday. This means while your baby is in nappies you’ll spend a fair bit of money. Therefore you may want to try and reduce that cost. We look at the cost of nappies and how you can reduce the cost of baby nappies.

For this article we looked mainly at Pampers nappies as a base for our research as it’s the most widely stocked brand across supermarkets.

If you want to know the full cost of a baby in the first twelve months you can read our article, ‘How much does a baby cost‘.

How many nappies does a baby use per day

When working out the cost of baby nappies over a year, we need to know how many they use per day. To start with it’s ‘a lot’. A newborn baby needs changing around 8 to 10 times per day.

A baby will go through around 4500 nappies while wearing them.

A thing to note is that as babies grow the cost per nappy goes up! fortunately, they start to use less, so that cost balances out and reduces slightly. Close to the time, they start potty training a baby will use around 4 nappies per day.

The cost of baby nappies

The average cost of nappies is 14.6 pence.
When you start buying nappies it’ll cost about 94 pence per day. About £6.58 per week. To when you’re about to stop using nappies it’ll cost around 64 pence per day. That’s £4.48 per week.

Buy nappies in bulk

One way of saving money on baby nappies is to buy them in bulk. Buying the biggest pack you can reduce the cost of pampers nappies from 18.2 pence per nappy down to 10.5 pence per nappy! Of course, one thing you have to be aware of is, if your baby needs to go up a size. You don’t want to be stuck with lots of nappies that don’t fit properly.

Shop around for nappies

Supermarkets are constantly doing multi-buy offers. Therefore it’s worth checking online for which supermarket has the best deals on, as long as you don’t mind shopping in different places. There is always online shopping too, if you’re buying nappies in bulk you can easily build up that spend.

Use a supermarkets own brand of nappies

Using a supermarkets own brand of nappies can be where you see the biggest savings. you can save around 50% compared to pampers nappies. You may have to try a couple of different supermarkets ‘own brand’ nappies to find ones you are happy with though. One supermarket brand we tried had lots of leaks, which made it definatlely not worth the saving!

Potty training

The best way to save money it to potty train your baby as soon as possible. Most babies are ready for potty training at around 3 years old. A small percentage are ready before they are 2 years old and some will be around the 3 and a half year mark.

Saving the environment – reusable nappies

In the UK we throw away around 7 to 8 million disposable nappies every single day.

Apparently disposable nappies could take up to 500 years to break down! It’s reported that despite the high set up cost of reusable nappies there are slight savings to be made however you have the cost and time of washing them. this uses water and electricity.

If you go down the route of using reusable nappies you may want to consider using a mix of both, especially at night or on long journeys, as disposable nappies do an excellent job of keeping moisture away from the skin, preventing nappy rash.

Another benefit of reusable nappies is that you can use them again if you plan to have more children or you can sell them on to recoup some of the cost.