5 Free Google Sheets Budget Templates That Actually Work

What 'free' actually means for budget templates

A free template is only a good deal if it doesn't cost you a weekend. There are thousands of free budget spreadsheets on the internet — most of them are either 2015-era budget calculators with broken formulas, lead magnets for a course you'll never buy, or 30-tab monsters designed by someone who never opened them on a phone. This is a short, honest roundup of the five free budget templates we'd actually recommend, including the one we make ourselves.

The rule we used: each option has to be fully functional without paying, has to be a real budget (not just an expense log), and has to be something a normal person can set up in under 15 minutes. We tested each one for a week of fake-but-realistic spending.

1. Completo's free Budget Planner (Excel)

Yes, we make this one — but we'd recommend it even if we didn't, because it's the only free template on this list that comes with a setup walkthrough and gets updated. It's Excel, not Google Sheets, which is a real trade-off (no real-time collaboration, no auto-cloud sync). But for a solo budgeter who already has Excel, the dashboard, categories, and 12-month view are better than anything else at this price point.

2. The r/personalfinance template (Google Sheets)

The community-maintained template on Reddit's r/personalfinance is the closest thing the spreadsheet world has to a public good. It's a no-frills zero-based budget with a clean categorization system, monthly and yearly views, and zero upsell. It's also been forked a hundred times, so the version you find might have a few quirks — fix them once and you're set.

The catch: setup is genuinely 30 minutes, not 15. The instructions are written by a forum, and the formulas assume you understand what a category bucket is. If you're new to zero-based budgeting, expect to learn the system before you can use it.

3. Google's built-in Monthly Budget template

Open Google Sheets, click 'Template Gallery,' and there it is — the official Monthly Budget template. It's basic, but it works. Two tabs, a few charts, and not a single formula to write. If you've never used a budget template before and you want to start this afternoon, this is the lowest-friction option on the list.

The downside is also the upside: it's basic. After a month or two you'll outgrow it — no sinking funds, no net-worth tracking, no annual view. But as a first budget, it's hard to beat free and built-in.

4. Tiller's free trial spreadsheet (Google Sheets)

Tiller is a paid service that auto-imports bank transactions into Google Sheets. They offer a free 30-day trial that comes with a genuinely good budget template — and after the trial, the template still works, you just lose the auto-import. If you're willing to manually enter transactions (or paste from a CSV), the template itself is yours forever.

Worth knowing: the template is configured to expect Tiller's data format. If you stop paying, you can keep using the sheet but you'll need to adjust the columns to match how you enter data.

5. A hand-rolled budget from scratch

Sometimes the best free template is one you build in 20 minutes. Three tabs: a transactions log, a category summary with SUMIF, and a dashboard with three sparklines. That's it. The advantage of building your own is that you understand every formula — and you can change anything without breaking someone else's structure.

• Transactions tab: Date, Amount, Category, Description.
• Summary tab: =SUMIF(transactions!C:C, A2, transactions!B:B) per category.
• Dashboard tab: a sparkline of monthly spend, a bar chart of category totals, and a single net-savings number.

How to pick

Use Google's built-in if it's your first budget. Use Tiller's if you want the most polished free dashboard and don't mind manual entry. Use the r/personalfinance template if you're committed to zero-based budgeting. Use Completo's free Budget Planner if you have Excel and want something maintained. Build your own if you want to actually understand your money. The best free budget is the one you'll open weekly — pick the one that fits how you already work.

A free template you use for a year beats a paid app you abandon in a month. Free isn't the constraint; friction is.