School Supplies: The Most Expensive Day of the Summer

The last week of August always costs more than it seems

Families with school-age children know that one specific day on the calendar well. It falls in the last week of August, almost always a Saturday, almost always in the heat, and it consists of a guided tour of three shops: the stationery store, the shoe shop and the store where you buy the uniform or the sports kit. You come home loaded down, with the feeling of having solved the start of term, and when you open the bank statement a hole appears that in July nobody had fully budgeted for.

The numbers, without drama, are what they are. For a family with two primary-school children, the average back-to-school cost in 2026 ranges between four hundred and six hundred euros, depending on the region, type of school and the state of last year's footwear. If the children are in secondary school and one of them is changing stage, the figure can easily approach nine hundred euros. For many families, that's between fifteen and twenty percent of the household's net monthly salary.

The most curious thing about the phenomenon is that it's perfectly predictable. It's not a fridge breakdown, it's not a medical emergency: the start of term happens every year on the same dates, with figures that move within a known range. And yet, one in two families still faces it as if it were a surprise. That, at least, is avoidable.

Why it all piles into August and why that drives up the bill

The first mistake is buying late. The retailer's psychology is honest: if the family walks into the shop on 28 August at eleven in the morning knowing term starts on 9 September, they're in no position to compare prices. They'll buy whatever's available in their size, whatever resembles the model the school asks for, and they'll pay the marked price without haggling. Big-box stores and specialist shops know perfectly well that this spike of demand concentrated into ten days lets them keep margins that would be unthinkable in July.

The second mistake is buying everything at once, in the same shop, for convenience. A stationery store might have a reasonable price on notebooks and an inflated one on backpacks; a sports shop might compete well on tracksuits and badly on everyday footwear. If everything is concentrated into one morning's tour, the family pays an average markup that could have been avoided by spreading the purchases over six or seven weeks, but by that point in summer nobody has the energy to do it.

The third, and the least confessable, is the refusal to reuse last year's things. Kids want a new backpack even if last year's is spotless, and parents sometimes struggle to resist the symbolic gesture of something brand-new. The entire back-to-school industry rests partly on that emotional fragility.

How to break down the expense piece by piece

1. Books: the school's book bank and the second-hand market

Textbooks, except in first and second of primary where they're often consumable, are the line item easiest to bring down in price if you step outside the official shop. Most schools have active book banks: if you returned them in good condition last year, this year you pay a symbolic fee (between twenty and forty euros per child) and receive the complete set. If the school has no bank, there are second-hand platforms and the school parents' association (AMPA) groups where books get exchanged between year groups for five or ten euros a unit.

A concrete example. A family with two primary-school children who bought the books new at the official stationery store would spend between 280 and 340 euros. The same family, using the book bank and second-hand for the non-consumables, drops to between 80 and 110 euros. We're talking about a saving of two hundred euros without leaving the kids without materials.

2. Uniform and shoes: the size cycle

The school uniform usually has an imposed single supplier and a rigid price. What you can manage is the cycle: take advantage of the AMPA's exchange days at the end of the previous year, where families sell for three euros what a second child will wear. If you have two children two years apart, a well-managed cycle means you only buy the whole uniform for the older one; the younger one's arrives as hand-me-down.

Shoes, by contrast, have to be bought new for hygiene and podiatric-health reasons. That said, buying them in July during the sales, not the last week of August at full marked price, saves between fifteen and thirty euros per pair. For a family with two children, that's sixty euros less without effort.

3. Consumable materials: notebooks, pencils, backpack

The small but cumulative line item. Here the useful rule is to buy in bulk in May or June, when the big-box stores clear out the outgoing year's stock, and complete whatever's missing in the first week of September once you know the school's exact list. The backpack, if it's not broken, gets handed down. The pencil case, if it's not broken, gets handed down. The secondary-school scientific calculator, barring a required model change, lasts between six and eight years.

A family that applies the three rules above with discipline brings the back-to-school bill down from around five hundred euros to about two hundred and forty per child, leaving a margin for the typical first-week surprise (a teacher who asks for a specific notebook, an activity that requires extra materials).

The voucher and the trap of not claiming it

Fifteen autonomous regions have, under different names, school-material grants aimed at families below a certain income. The amounts range from sixty to two hundred euros per child, with some supplements for books. The trap, told without intent to offend, is that many families who meet the requirements don't apply for them: out of ignorance, because of the complexity of the process, or because they consider their income too high when in fact they're within the bracket.

The process, in almost every region, is done online in May or June with a digital certificate or cl@ve, requires the previous year's tax return, and is resolved in six or eight weeks. Yes, it's paperwork. But a hundred and twenty euros per child for a half-hour process is an hourly wage very hard to match with anything else you do that month.

Beyond the regional voucher, it's worth not overlooking the regional income-tax deductions for education expenses (Madrid, Catalonia, Murcia, Aragon, Castile and León and others have some version). They're modest amounts, between fifteen and a hundred euros in the end, but accumulated over the years of schooling they add up.

How to organize the expense so it isn't an August drama

The structural solution is to stop treating school materials as a surprise and start treating them as a predictable expense spread over the year. That means setting aside between forty and sixty euros a month per child in a subaccount tagged "back to school," from October to June of the following year. When August comes, the family buys against that fund without the month's salary being touched.

For a family with several children, splitting well who pays what within that fund (especially if the parents have asymmetric incomes or are separated with shared custody) is where the second problem appears. A decent system should let you group all school-related expenses under one tag, see the accumulated total, and split it according to the rules the family has agreed on. This is what a tool like ControlarGastos does: the expense is tagged once as school materials, charged to the corresponding fund, and the split is calculated to the cent by largest remainder, not by truncation. That, which seems like a detail, in a family with two children over twelve years of schooling amounts to several hundred euros well allocated.

Conclusion: foresight is worth more than a discount

Articles about back to school almost all end with a list of discounts and chain-store comparisons. That's fine, but the real saving isn't there. The real saving is in two things done in May and June, not in August: claiming what you're entitled to from the book bank and the regional voucher, and having set aside the fund's money month by month. Everything else, comparing three stationery stores in the last week of August, is hard work with little reward.

The family that faces September without the feeling of having been run over is the one that stopped treating the start of term as an annual emergency. It's not a trick; it's having accepted that a school-age child generates, every year, a perfectly predictable expense that deserves its own line in the family budget. Once that's accepted, August stops hurting.