Most parents don’t sign their kids up for swimming lessons, Saturday soccer, or guitar because they’ve done a careful cost-benefit analysis. They do it because their kid asked, or because their friend’s kid is doing it, or because they want to give them opportunities they didn’t have growing up. That impulse is completely understandable. It’s also getting increasingly expensive to act on.
Australian parents are currently spending an average of $1,779 per child, per year on extracurricular activities. Multiply that across the country and you’re looking at more than $4.7 billion annually, according to ING research from early 2025. And 88% of those parents expect the costs to go up even further. Almost one in ten said they genuinely didn’t know where they’d find the money to keep paying.
That’s a lot of families quietly stressing about something that’s supposed to be fun.
The cost of participating has changed dramatically
Registration fees alone have climbed steadily for years. The average amount Australian parents paid per child for organised sport in 2023-24 was $1,065, and that figure excluded uniforms, equipment, travel, and tournament costs. Add those in and you’re easily looking at $1,500 or more for a single sport. Two kids in two different sports and you’re north of $3,000 before you’ve bought a pair of boots.
Some numbers tell the story better than any average can. Football registration fees for a child at one Queensland club now run from $376 for under-7s to $486 for teenagers, before uniforms, shorts, and socks are factored in. Football Australia recently increased its national registration fee by up to 20%, with club youth players copping the biggest hike. Swimming, gymnastics, tennis, cricket, and basketball all cost families more than $500 a year in registration and membership alone, based on AusPlay survey data released in 2025. That’s before you’ve touched the equipment bag.
Clubs aren’t gouging families for sport of it. The Australian Sports Foundation estimated the average sports club was paying around $20,000 more per year in running costs compared to before the pandemic. Coaches cost more. Ground hire costs more. Insurance costs more. Those costs flow through to registration fees because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
The pressure isn’t just financial, it’s social
Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in the data but every parent recognises: the guilt of saying no.
When your kid comes home and says their best friend is doing drama classes, or the whole school group chat is full of weekend hockey fixtures, or their cousin just started private tennis coaching, the maths gets complicated in a way that has nothing to do with your bank account. Parents aren’t just weighing up whether they can afford an activity. They’re weighing up whether their child will feel left out, fall behind socially, or miss a window they can’t reopen later.
One headmaster put it clearly: FOMO, the fear of missing out, has become the new keeping up with the Joneses, but now it runs through parents as much as it does through kids. Social media makes it more visible than it ever used to be. You don’t just hear that the other kids had a great gymnastics competition. You see the photos, the ribbons, the whole Saturday played out in a grid of highlights. That visibility raises the stakes for everyone, including parents who are already stretched.
ING’s research found that 93% of parents have made personal sacrifices to cover these costs. Almost a quarter gave up their own hobbies. A third cut streaming services. These are not small adjustments. These are people quietly trimming their own lives to fund their children’s activities, often without their kids knowing.
Before and after school care adds another layer
Separate from extracurriculars, before and after school care is costing Australian families an average of $166 per week per household. More than half of parents surveyed expected that figure to rise further this year. Fifteen per cent said they needed to use the service more because they were working additional hours just to cover rising costs generally.
So you have a situation where some parents are working more to afford the cost of living, which means they need more childcare, which costs more money, which means they need to work more. The activities are almost a separate problem sitting on top of that.
What families are actually doing about it
The honest answer is that most families are picking and choosing more carefully than they used to, and feeling some version of guilt about it either way.
Some are limiting each child to one activity per term rather than running multiple at once. Others are rotating, so one season is swimming, the next is football, rather than stacking them. Some parents are leaning on the government voucher schemes that exist in most states: Queensland’s FairPlay vouchers offer up to $200 per child, NSW’s Active and Creative Kids vouchers provide similar support, and South Australia recently doubled its Sports Vouchers Plus program to two $100 vouchers per child per year. These help, but a $100 or $200 voucher against a $500 to $1,000 registration fee is a partial answer at best. As one sports science professor put it, it’s insufficient for many families.
Some parents are also getting more comfortable with conversations they used to avoid. Talking to clubs about payment plans, asking whether second-hand uniforms are available, and checking whether there are sibling discounts. These aren’t shameful questions. They’re practical ones, and most clubs would rather have a child participate than lose them over a fee they could have worked around.
The part nobody really wants to say out loud
Kids don’t need to do every activity. They don’t need to do three activities. Some of the most important things children develop, like patience, creativity, the ability to entertain themselves, and an inner sense of what they actually enjoy, don’t come from a structured programme with a registration fee attached.
The pressure parents feel to provide a full schedule of enriching experiences is real, but a lot of it is manufactured by comparison rather than by what children actually need. Kids who have one activity they genuinely love, and time to be bored in between, tend to do just fine.
That’s easy to say and harder to feel when you’re watching the group chat and wondering if your family is the only one not signed up for Saturday morning netball.
But if the choice is between stretching the budget past its limit and having an honest conversation with your kid about what you can actually do this term, the second option is usually better for everyone, including them.
