Bill Splitter
Work out who owes who, in one link.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Work out who owes who, without the arithmetic at the table
Somebody got the restaurant. Somebody else got the taxi, and the person who booked the house paid for the whole house in February and has been too polite to mention it since. By the end of a weekend away there is a tangle of payments that everybody vaguely remembers and nobody wants to be the one to untangle. This is the tool for that moment.
Put in who was there and what each person paid for. The bill is pooled, divided equally, and turned into the shortest list of payments that leaves everyone square. Not a payment app, not an account to make, not a notification three weeks later — just the answer, and a link you can send to the group so they can check the numbers themselves.
How to use it
- List everyone who is splitting the bill. Nicknames are fine; these are names your friends will read.
- Add a row for each thing somebody paid for: who paid, how much, and what it was for.
- Set the currency symbol once. Everything on the page is in that one currency.
- Read the payments underneath. They update as you type, so nothing needs submitting.
- Copy the share link and send it to the group. The whole bill travels inside the link.
Good uses
- A weekend away, where the house, the food shop and the petrol were paid by three different people.
- A group meal where one card went in at the end and everyone said they would sort it later.
- Flatmates settling up at the end of a month of small shared purchases.
- A stag or hen weekend, where the person organising it has been quietly funding everyone for a fortnight.
- Any trip where somebody is owed money and is too polite to ask twice.
Reading the result
The table shows three numbers for each person: what they paid, what their share was, and the difference. A positive balance means they are owed that much; a negative one means they owe it. The balances always add up to exactly zero, because every penny somebody overpaid is a penny somebody else underpaid.
Above the table is the plan itself. Each line is one payment from one person to another, and the list is as short as it can sensibly be: the person owed the most is paid by the person who owes the most, repeatedly, until everybody is at zero. A group of six will never be asked to make more than five payments, and usually makes far fewer. That matters more than it sounds. The reason splitting a bill feels painful is rarely the arithmetic — it is six people sending each other eleven separate transfers for four pounds apiece.
About the pennies
Money is handled in whole pennies from beginning to end. Nothing here is ever a fraction, which is why the totals always close exactly rather than drifting by a penny somewhere in the middle. When a total genuinely cannot be divided equally — forty pounds between three people is the classic — the leftover pennies go to the people at the top of the list, one each, until they are gone. It is an arbitrary rule and it is stated openly for that reason: an arbitrary rule you can see beats a clever one you cannot.
Questions people ask
- How is each person's share worked out?
- Everything anybody paid is added into one total, and that total is divided equally by the number of people on the list. It does not matter who paid for what: a bill is a bill, and the point of pooling it is that nobody has to remember who ordered the second bottle.
- The total does not divide evenly. Where does the odd penny go?
- To the top of the list. Forty pounds between three people is 13.33 each, which comes to 39.99, so the first person carries the extra penny and pays 13.34. If two pennies are left over the first two people carry one each, and so on. It has to land somewhere — the shares must add back up to what was actually spent, or the payments would not settle — and the top of the list is the one place you can check for yourself.
- Why so few payments?
- Because the person owed the most is always paid by the person who owes the most, over and over, until nobody is owed anything. Each payment squares at least one person off completely, so a group of six never needs more than five payments. Handing money back and forth in a circle is how a simple dinner turns into an argument.
- Can somebody be left out of one particular expense?
- No, and that is deliberate. Everyone splits everything equally. Per-expense participants sound reasonable until you are tapping checkboxes for the fourth round of drinks, and most groups are better served by adding the one genuinely uneven item as its own bill, or by shrugging and letting it even out. If one person really did eat alone, take that meal out of the list entirely.
- What happens if I remove somebody?
- Anything they paid leaves with them. The alternative would be to hand their expenses to whoever happens to be first in the list, which quietly puts money in a stranger's column. If you only meant to fix a typo, edit their name instead of removing them.
- Does my bill get sent anywhere?
- No. Everything is worked out in your browser and nothing is stored on our servers. Copy share link puts the whole bill inside the link itself, so only the people you send it to can read it. Gleekit never takes, holds or moves money — this works out who should pay whom, and the paying is between you.
- Which currency is this in?
- Whichever one you type into the currency box. It is only a label: nothing here converts between currencies, because that would need exchange rates we have no business guessing at. One bill, one currency.