Expenses

The new backpack is waiting by the door, but before the child enters school for the first time, parents face a significant shopping list. A backpack, pencil case, notebooks, writing utensils, and textbooks add up to a substantial amount. How much does it really cost to prepare a child for first grade?

A dense convergence of three massive expenses at the end of the summer creates an unprecedented cash flow gap of tens of thousands of shekels beyond the monthly income, pushing the middle class into a dangerous spiral.

Purchase tax, lawyer fees, brokerage, appraisal, renovation, and moving add 155,000–185,000 shekels above the contract price, and for an additional apartment, the tax alone reaches 200,000 shekels.

The average monthly expenditure of a household in Israel is 18,088 shekels, but a family with two children in the center can exceed 25 thousand.

In a report on Channel 12 that dealt with the cost of living and the question of how much it costs to grow old in Israel, Yossi, a pensioner in his 70s, revealed his monthly expenses which reached an especially high amount. In front of the cameras he admitted with pain: 'My daughter helps me with food containers, it is a shame' | All the details

Private kindergartens crossing the 10,000-shekel threshold, strollers priced like a used car, and the long-deflated “million shekels” myth: raising children in Israel in 2026 is an economic task that squeezes the middle class. A look at the numbers behind parenting—and why parents struggle to keep their heads above water, from the first diaper to the day of release from IDF service.

Following a legal battle, the expense breakdown for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residences has been revealed: nearly 2 million shekels were spent in 2025 and another 731 thousand shekels in the first half of 2026. An expense of about 63 thousand shekels was completely redacted.