The Best Expense Splitting Apps for Roommates in 2026

Most expense app comparisons are written around a group trip. Six people, five expenses a day, two currencies, everyone squared up before the flight home. A shared apartment is close to the opposite shape. You might log eight expenses in a month, but the same five bills repeat every month, the ledger stays open for two years, and at some point somebody moves out in the middle of the lease.

Our general roundup of the best expense splitting apps ranks these apps on overall feature depth, and that's the right page if you're comparing them broadly. This one applies a narrower test: recurring bills, uneven splits that stay set, partial repayments, and balances that have to survive a change of roommates. Ranked that way, the order comes out differently. We build SplitterUp, so weigh this accordingly. Everything below is stated in terms of what each app actually does.

What Actually Matters for Roommates

Six things decide whether an app works for a household. None of them are the criteria that decide a trip.

• Recurring bills: Rent, internet, electricity, water, and the streaming plan arrive on a schedule. An app that makes you retype them every month is adding work rather than removing it.
• An end date on the recurrence: Leases end. Roommates leave. A repeating expense that runs forever until someone remembers to cancel it will quietly generate rent charges after you've moved out.
• Uneven splits that stay set: The master bedroom pays more than the box room. Two people on very different incomes may split 60/40. That ratio needs to be configured once, not re-entered on every expense.
• Partial settlements: Roommate repayment is rarely a clean transfer. Someone hands you $60 in cash against a $145 balance. The app has to reduce the balance rather than zero it.
• Long-lived balances: Trip groups get settled and archived. Household groups run for years, and a running balance that rolls over month to month is normal, not a problem to be cleared.
• Someone moving out mid-lease: The person leaving usually owes something or is owed something. How the app handles a departing member with a non-zero balance is a real difference between these products.

Two criteria that dominate the general roundup barely register here. Multi-currency matters on holiday and almost never in a shared flat. Speed of entry during a high-volume day matters when you're logging six things between breakfast and dinner, which is not a Tuesday at home. That's also why the daily expense cap on free Splitwise matters on a trip and is much less likely to matter for a household.

SplitterUp

Best for: Households that want recurring bills with an end date, a split ratio saved once, and a ledger that survives people coming and going.

Recurring expenses are the part built for this case. Toggle Repeat when creating an expense and pick daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, yearly, or a custom interval, then set an optional end date or let it run until you cancel. A separate management screen lists every recurring expense in one place with its generation history and next scheduled date, and each one can be paused, resumed, or stopped. Editing a single occurrence is distinct from editing the template, so a month where the electric bill jumps doesn't rewrite the schedule.

Uneven splits are set at the group level. Configure percentages once so rent tracks room size, and every subsequent entry in that group uses the same ratio. The rent and roommates page walks through that setup, and utilities covers the bills that vary month to month.

Departures are handled explicitly rather than blocked. A roommate who leaves with an outstanding balance moves into a former members list where the amount stays visible and actionable, group admins are warned when a former member still owes money, and removing someone prompts you for how to settle what they left behind. When someone new moves in, Smart Re-split lets them choose which existing expenses they're part of. Households also lets a couple sharing a room act as a single unit in the group, which avoids the usual mess of two people each holding half of the same share.

Pros:

• Recurring expenses with an optional end date, plus pause, resume, and stop from one screen
• Percentage splits saved per group, so room-size ratios apply automatically
• Partial payments reduce a balance instead of clearing it
• Former members with unresolved balances stay visible and settleable
• No daily expense limit and no ads
• Item-level receipt scanning, which separates shared groceries from personal ones on the same receipt
• iOS, macOS, Android, and a web app at web.splitterup.app
• Free for a limited time, and accounts created now keep Premium permanently

Cons:

• Newer than the alternatives, so your roommates are unlikely to already have it installed
• Everyone in the household has to sign up, which is a real cost when one roommate is resistant to new apps
• Multi-currency support is a genuine strength that a single-country household will never touch

Splitwise

Suits: Households where everyone already has it, and where the monthly bills are stable enough that a repeating expense can be set once and left alone.

Splitwise's biggest drawback matters less to a household, for one specific reason. That drawback is the cap on how many expenses free accounts can add per day: Splitwise's help center says free users can add up to 4 expenses each day. A household adds rent, four bills, and a couple of grocery runs across an entire month. Spread over thirty days, the cap rarely comes up. We went through the free tier and the Pro upgrade in detail in our Splitwise free vs Pro breakdown.

Recurring bills are described in Splitwise's help center and are not on its Pro page's list. Open the date field on an expense and set it to repeat weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or yearly, with an optional email reminder to everyone on the expense before each occurrence posts. Editing the latest entry updates future amounts without touching past ones, which is the practical way to handle an electric bill that changes every month. Its App Store listing also lists splitting equally or unequally by percentages, shares, or exact amounts among its general features. Splitwise's help pages don't describe partial repayment, so confirm how it works before relying on it.

Two gaps matter for a household specifically. Splitwise's help center says recurring expenses repeat forever unless you stop them or remove an involved group member, and it describes no end date to set at creation. For a twelve-month lease that means a manual cancellation you have to remember. Separately, default split settings are on its Pro page's list, so free users setting a 60/40 rent split would be re-entering it each time. We ran the cost breakdown in is Splitwise Pro worth it?

Pros:

• Recurring bills on the free tier, with weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and yearly intervals
• Optional email reminder before each recurrence posts
• Percentage and share splits included free
• The most App Store ratings of the four, so roommates may already have an account
• iOS, Android, and web

Cons:

• Recurring expenses repeat until you cancel them, and its help center describes no end date
• Default split settings are a Pro feature; as of August 2026 its upgrade screen listed $59.99 a year or $7.99 a month (pricing varies by region)
• Per its help center, a member with an outstanding balance can't be removed until the balance is cleared
• Ads on the free version
• Itemization and currency conversion are Pro-only

Settle Up

Suits: Households willing to buy a premium plan once for the whole group, particularly on Android.

Settle Up's App Store listing describes unequal weights, and its tips page says you can set a default share on a member, so a couple sharing one room can count as 2 against everyone else's 1 in all new transactions without recalculating anything.

Recurring and future expenses are supported and are described by Settle Up as automating rent, subscriptions, and utility bills. They sit on the premium tier rather than the free one. Premium is listed in two shapes: individual plans, which the US App Store lists at $3.99 monthly or $19.99 yearly, and Group Premium, which its tips page says is enabled for everyone in a single group and can be bought as a one-time payment (the App Store lists several durations up to a lifetime option; pricing varies by plan and region). For roommates, one person can buy Group Premium and the whole household gets the features.

The App Store listing includes offline entry that syncs later, all currencies, and CSV export without Premium, and lists ad-free use and recurring bills under Premium. Its listings don't describe a cap on transactions.

Pros:

• Weights and default member shares handle couples and unequal rooms without manual percentage math
• Recurring and future expenses cover rent, subscriptions, and utilities
• Group Premium covers everyone in the group and can be bought as a one-time payment
• No transaction cap described in its listings, and offline entry that syncs later
• Its App Store listing says it calculates the fewest possible transfers

Cons:

• Recurring expenses are listed under Premium
• Ads on the free tier
• Its listings don't describe partial settlements, so confirm how they work before relying on it

Tricount

Suits: Small households that want a free ledger and don't mind typing the same bills in every month.

Tricount's App Store listing describes it as free with no subscription, no hidden fees, and no limit on tricounts or expenses, and its homepage says no ads. It is owned by bunq, a European neobank that bought it in 2022 and presented the deal as adding Tricount's 5.4 million users to its platform. bunq promotes its own Card and bunq account inside the app, and Tricount's help center says new sign-ups get a bunq account. Its feature pages describe adjusting each person's share of an expense, so a 40/30/30 room-size split can be entered per expense, and it has a Splitwise importer, which lowers the cost of switching.

The gap for a household is recurring expenses. Tricount's pages don't describe a repeat option, so plan on re-entering rent, internet, electric, water, and the streaming plan each month. On a trip that's a non-issue. Across a twelve-month lease it's roughly sixty manual entries, and its pages don't describe a saved group default split either.

Pros:

• Free, with no subscription and no limit on expenses per its App Store listing; advertises no ads
• Per-participant shares make room-size and usage splits easy to express
• Offline entry that syncs when you reconnect, per its feature pages
• Imports existing data from Splitwise

Cons:

• Its pages don't describe recurring expenses, so plan on entering monthly bills by hand
• Its pages don't describe a saved default split
• Available on iOS and Android; its sign-ups come with a bunq account (help center)
• Its pages don't describe assigning receipt items to people, which mixed shared and personal grocery receipts need

Comparison Table

*Create your account while SplitterUp is free for a limited time and you keep Premium permanently. Join later and it's a one-time $4.99 purchase, never a subscription. Competitor pricing varies by plan and region.

What About a Spreadsheet?

For two roommates with three bills, a shared Google Sheet is genuinely fine, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Two people means one balance. Rent, internet, and power means three rows a month. The arithmetic is subtraction. A sheet is free, needs no signups, and nobody has to be persuaded to install anything.

It stops working at predictable points. The first is the third roommate, because three people produce three pairwise balances instead of one, and working out the smallest set of payments that clears them is no longer something you do in your head. The second is uneven percentages, since a 40/35/25 split re-derived by hand every month is where arithmetic errors creep in and get argued about later. The third is the one that actually kills most spreadsheets: whoever set it up maintains it, that person gets tired of chasing everyone, and by month four the sheet is two months stale and nobody trusts it.

The honest test is whether every person will update it from their own phone within a day of spending money. If yes, keep the sheet. If the answer is that one person does the tracking for everybody, an app is worth the setup, because shared entry is the actual feature. Our guide on how to split expenses with roommates covers the ground rules worth agreeing on either way.

Which to Pick

If your roommates already use Splitwise: It works. Recurring bills and percentage splits aren't on its Pro page's list, and the daily cap is unlikely to affect a household. If the missing end date or saved default split starts to bite, SplitterUp's Splitwise import brings your existing groups and balances along rather than making everyone start over. Until then, set a calendar reminder for when your lease ends so you remember to cancel the recurring rent expense.

If you're setting things up fresh: SplitterUp is the pick. Recurring bills with an end date, a percentage split configured once at the group level, and departing roommates who stay visible until their balance is resolved are the three things a household hits repeatedly, and they're free here rather than on a paid tier.

If your household has an unusual shape: SplitterUp's Households treats a couple sharing a room as one unit in the group. Settle Up also fits, since a couple in one room, a lodger paying a fixed share, or someone whose contribution scales with income are easy to express as weights, and one group plan covers everyone.

If you want a ledger with no paid tier at all: Tricount fits, as long as you accept that its pages don't describe recurring bills, so you would enter the same five bills each month.

If it's two of you and three bills: A shared spreadsheet, until it breaks.

For the broader ranking across trips, dinners, and one-off splits, the general roundup is the parent to this page, and the comparison table covers feature-level specifics side by side.