One of the primary benefits of using cloth diapers is the savings over disposables.
But how much exactly can you save? In this post I run through 3 different scenarios and break down the costs and savings of each.
(Did you miss part one of the series, pros and cons of cloth diapers? Read it here first!)
In this post I’ll be giving real life examples and total cost of 3 scenarios:
1. Disposables only
2. Budget cloth, which I’m defining as prefolds, flats and covers. Because the covers can be reused a couple times before washing, you need fewer of them, so this option is more cost effective.
3. Convenience cloth, which I consider AIOs (all in ones) and pocket diapers. These are more similar to disposables in that it’s all one piece.
I want to re-emphasize that cloth is not all or nothing. For my family, we personally use disposables at night.
However, to make the math easy, these are the “all or nothing” scenarios I have laid out. Treat these as potential savings.
These savings can be even larger if you are able to reuse your cloth diaper stash for future kids! Also, cloth diapers tend to have pretty great re-sale potential, especially AIOs and pockets.
Methodology
Here I’ll explain the exact factors I used to get to my results. If you’d just like to see the final savings calculation, scroll down to the chart below!
Diapers per day
I’ve broken the diaper age into two groups – newborn (0-5 months) and baby/toddler (6 months – 2.5 years.) I’m using 2.5 as an average potty trained age. Newborns go through a LOT of diapers, like 10-14 per day, while older babies – toddlers go through fewer. I used 14/day in my calculations for newborns and 5/day for the older group for my estimate.
Wipes
The way I see it, if you’re doing cloth diaper laundry you may as well throw cloth wipes in there too! For the disposable estimate, I calculated 20 wipes/day for newborn group and 10/day for the older group.
Side note: an added bonus to cloth wipes is they work so much better! They “grab” the mess much easier so it takes fewer wipes and less time to get nice and clean. I personally just used water on my cloth wipes so I’m not adding in the cost of any cleaning solution.
Accessories
I didn’t include any accessories for disposables although many people will purchase a diaper pail. In my opinion they are a little more necessary for cloth, so I’ve included the following because it’s what I use: 2 Grovia large pail liners for laundry pails (one to use while the other’s in the wash), along with 4 wet bags for diaper changes on the go.
Laundry Detergent
Tide Free and Gentle is what I use for all our laundry so that’s what I’ve priced, based on 3 extra loads a week for 2.5 years.
Disposables Cost
I used Pampers swaddlers in the largest pack. My cost breakdown came out to $0.29 per newborn diaper and $0.33 per baby-toddler diaper.
Cloth Diapers Cost
There are thousands of options, but here’s what I used for the calculation.
budget cloth
Newborn: to make it easy, I used this newborn kit from Green Mountain Diapers which should have everything you would need for the first 5 months.
Baby-toddler: 24 muslin flats and 12 covers.
CONVENIENCE CLOTH
Newborn: 36 thirsties newborn AIOs
Baby-toddler: My current favorite is Petite Crown, so I calculated 18 of their one size diapers.
Wipes: Since the budget cloth newborn kit included wipes, I added in the cost of 36 cloth-eez double sided wipes.
THE SAVINGS
As you can see, if you followed these scenarios exactly, you could save $2,209.98 per child using the budget cloth setup, or $1,727.84 using the convenience cloth setup.
Final notes
I hope this was helpful! This is just for illustration purposes of course. If cloth diapering is something you are considering, I highly recommend buying several different types and brands, rather than doing all the same like I’ve done here to keep the math as simple as possible. You may like a certain brand better than another and the fit varies on differently shaped babies.
Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain Amazon affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission. Read full privacy policy here.“
