Best app to split rent with roommates in 2026
Three friends, one apartment, one rent slip and a hundred small bills a month. Whoever fronts the deposit and whoever pays the internet end up doing the math, and that's where roommate friendships start to fray. This guide tests five apps across three real setups (equal split, proportional by room, designated payer) and tells you which one to install today.
I lived in a 3-bedroom in Florianópolis with two friends for two years and we cycled through four splitting apps before settling. I've also helped a couple in Buenos Aires figure out the rent-versus-utilities split with their au pair (proportional, not equal) and a Berlin-Lisbon designer who pays a US digital nomad the dollar share of a euro flat. Same three patterns keep coming back. This is the test of what actually held up in 2026.
What is the best app to split rent with roommates in 2026?
For most roommate setups Tricount is the best free pick in 2026 because Bunq killed the Premium tier and the whole app is free with no expense limit. Splitwise is still the gold standard if you want a running ledger across roommates plus trips. Capi Together suits expat roommates who pay in different currencies. SettleUp and Splid are strong free niches.
The read: there is no single winner for every roommate setup. The pick depends on whether you split equally with friends (Tricount or Splitwise free), whether one of you has the master bedroom (any of the five, with custom percentages), whether you live across currencies (Capi Together), or whether one roommate handles the lease and the others Venmo back a fixed amount (Splitwise free or a calendar reminder, no app required). Below I run each setup through the five apps with concrete numbers.
How do you split rent fairly when one roommate has the bigger bedroom?
Use proportional-by-room: each roommate's share equals their bedroom square footage divided by the total bedroom area. A typical 3-bed with a master and two equal smaller rooms lands roughly 40/30/30. Add shared space (living, kitchen, bathroom) split equally on top. Most apps support custom percentages; just lock the percentages into the rent template and reuse monthly.
Worked example. Brooklyn 3-bed, rent US$ 4,500/month. Master bedroom 180 sq ft with ensuite. Two other rooms 130 sq ft each. Total bedroom area 440 sq ft. Master share: 180 / 440 = 40.91%. Other rooms: 29.55% each. Sum: 100%. On US$ 4,500 that's US$ 1,840.50 / US$ 1,329.75 / US$ 1,329.75. Lease attorneys recommend rounding to clean numbers (US$ 1,840 / US$ 1,330 / US$ 1,330, summing back to US$ 4,500) and locking that in writing as an addendum to the lease for the year.
The two failure modes I've seen most. First: forgetting to recompute when a roommate moves out and a new one takes the small bedroom. The percentages stay the same as long as room assignments do; they reset on every change. Second: confusing rent with utilities. The proportional split applies to rent (you pay for square feet). Utilities are usage-based and usually split equally (everyone uses the same fridge, lights, internet). Mixing the two methods in one calculation is where most spreadsheets fall over.
Is Splitwise still worth paying for in 2026?
Splitwise Pro costs US$ 4.99/month or US$ 49.99/year in 2026, which buys unlimited expenses per day, receipt scanning, and charts. For a roommate group adding 1 to 5 expenses a month, the free tier still works most months despite the new daily limits. Pay for Pro if you also use it for travel groups or you really lean on receipt scanning.
Splitwise's real strength for roommates is the running ledger. You don't reconcile every month; balances accumulate and the "simplify debts" feature collapses them into the minimum number of transfers (instead of A owes B who owes C, it says A pays C and B walks away clean). That's the right model for an ongoing apartment, where you don't want to settle up after every Costco run. For a group adding receipts daily during a kitchen renovation, free tier hits the daily limit and Pro starts to earn its US$ 4.99. For three friends who add rent once a month and groceries weekly, the free tier still does the job in 2026 per Splitty's free-tier walkthrough.
What is the best free app to split bills with roommates?
Tricount by Bunq is the strongest free app for roommates in 2026. It removed the old Premium tier so the entire feature set is free: unlimited groups, unlimited expenses, multi-currency, custom splits by share or by percentage. SettleUp's free tier and Splid (no signup, full offline) are credible alternatives if you want something even leaner.
What changed in Tricount: Bunq, the Dutch fintech that bought Tricount, retired the Premium tier in the new app and made every Premium feature free. That's a real shift. For two years Tricount was a free-with-paywall play; now it's the most generous free roommate app on the market, per Bunq's own help docs. The downside: a couple of niche features (like advanced statistics that used to be Premium) were dropped entirely rather than moved to free. For a roommate apartment, none of those features matter. You will not notice they're gone.
SettleUp is the slightly nerdier free pick. The free tier covers the basics (groups, currency conversion, settle-up math) and Premium starts around US$ 1/month for individual upgrades, going up to roughly US$ 11/month for the most loaded group tier. Splid is the leanest free option: no signup, full offline, 150+ currencies, designed primarily for trips but works fine for short-term roommates (sublets, summer stays). Splid loses on long-term running ledgers because there's no account so cross-device sync is link-based.
How should one roommate handle paying everything and getting reimbursed?
Designated-payer is fine if you fix a monthly Venmo or Pix transfer date. Calculate each roommate's full share once at lease signing (rent, utilities estimate, internet, cleaning), round up R$ 30 or US$ 20 for buffer, and they pay that exact number on the 25th. Reconcile every 90 days against actual bills. Apps help here only as receipts.
The designated-payer pattern is more common than people admit. One roommate has the credit score and signs the lease, the others pay them back. Or in Brazil, only one person has the active Pix recurrence set up with the landlord. In Argentina, the lease in pesos sits under the highest-income roommate to clear the income proof; the others reimburse in dollars. None of this needs an app to track. It needs a date (the 25th of the month is my preferred default, two days before rent is due) and a rounded number both parties agreed to in writing.
Reconcile every 90 days, not every month. The whole point of designated-payer is to remove the monthly transactional friction. If you reconcile every month you've reinvented Splitwise the hard way. Pick a quarterly date (March 31, June 30, September 30, December 31), pull the actual rent + utility bills, compute the variance from the rounded estimate, and one Pix or Venmo transfer settles it. Less drama. Less weekly math.
How do you split rent with roommates who pay in different currencies?
Lock a planning FX rate at lease signing. If rent is R$ 4,500 in São Paulo and one roommate pays in USD, fix USD/BRL at, say, R$ 5.00 for the year. The USD share is computed from R$ 1,500 at R$ 5.00 = US$ 300/month, even if the spot rate moves to R$ 5.30 or R$ 4.70. Reconcile the rate annually. Capi Together does this natively; most apps require manual conversion.
This pattern is exploding. A Brazilian and a US digital nomad sharing a Floripa apartment. A Mexican freelancer and an Argentine sharing a Mexico City rental. A German remote worker splitting rent with a Portuguese roommate in Lisbon. Every one of those setups means somebody is doing FX math monthly. If the rate moves 5% over a year, one roommate is silently subsidizing the other. The fix is the planning rate locked in writing once a year, not the spot rate that floats daily, exactly like the multi-currency budget approach in my multi-currency expat guide.
Concrete worked example. São Paulo 3-bed, rent R$ 4,500. Equal split = R$ 1,500 each. One roommate paid in USD by a US employer. Planning rate locked at R$ 5.00 = US$ 300/month for the year. May 2026 spot rate landed around R$ 5.02 (so the USD-paying roommate is fractionally over-paying, by about US$ 1.20 a month). November 2026 spot rate could be R$ 4.80 (under-paying by ~US$ 12). Annual variance reconciled in January 2027 with one Pix or Venmo transfer; usually it ends up in the noise. Fixed-rate beats floating-rate not because the math is more correct but because it removes monthly arguments.
What's the difference between Splitwise and Tricount for roommates?
Splitwise has a running ledger that accumulates balances across months and a "simplify debts" algorithm; Pro tier handles unlimited expenses and receipts. Tricount has discrete tricounts (one per shared context: apartment, trip, garage) and is fully free with no Premium tier since Bunq killed it. Roommates with one ongoing apartment are better with Splitwise's ledger; roommates with three separate shared contexts prefer Tricount.
The mental model matters more than the feature list. Splitwise wants you to think of one ongoing relationship per group: Daniil owes Marina US$ 47, that's the truth as of right now, and every new expense updates that number. Tricount wants you to think in discrete events: this apartment, that road trip, the dinner where the bill got messy. Both work for roommates, but with different defaults. If your roommate group also takes a yearly trip together and you want it tracked together, Splitwise wins. If you want clean separation (the apartment account never mixes with last weekend's bachelor party), Tricount wins.
Does Capi Together work for splitting rent with roommates?
Yes if your roommates already use Telegram. Capi Together adds a shared Telegram chat for the apartment, every expense posted by anyone shows up to all, monthly summary auto-generated, multi-currency native (useful for expat roommates), US$ 99/year for the group. It's not built primarily as a Splitwise replacement; it's a money-tracking workspace that happens to handle roommate splits.
Realistic pitch: Capi Together is overkill if all you need is "who owes who". Splitwise free does that for zero dollars. Where Capi earns its US$ 99/year is when your roommate situation is also messy in other dimensions: multiple currencies, frequent travel together, you want both personal and shared finances in one chat, you live in Telegram already. For a 3-friend US apartment all paid in USD, install Splitwise or Tricount; come back to Capi if your roommate situation gets weirder than that.
Which roommate-splitting app fits which setup?
| App | Free tier | Paid tier (2026) | Best for roommate setup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tricount | Yes, fully free | No paid tier since Bunq retired Premium | Most roommate setups; multi-context |
| Splitwise | Yes, with daily expense limits | US$ 4.99/mo or US$ 49.99/yr | Long-term ongoing apartment |
| SettleUp | Yes, basics covered | ~US$ 1 to US$ 11/mo (varies by tier) | Nerdier groups; categorization-heavy |
| Splid | Yes, no signup, offline | Optional Pro (small one-time) | Short-term sublet or summer roommates |
| Capi Together | No, paid only | US$ 99/yr for the whole group | Multi-currency or Telegram-native |
FAQ: splitting rent with roommates in 2026
What is the best app to split rent with roommates in 2026?
For most roommate setups Tricount is the best free pick in 2026 because Bunq killed the Premium tier and the whole app is free with no expense limit. Splitwise is still the gold standard if you want a running ledger across roommates plus trips. Capi Together suits expat roommates who pay in different currencies. SettleUp and Splid are strong free niches.
How do you split rent fairly when one roommate has the bigger bedroom?
Use proportional-by-room: each roommate's share equals their bedroom square footage divided by the total bedroom area. A typical 3-bed with a master and two equal smaller rooms lands roughly 40/30/30. Add shared space (living, kitchen, bathroom) split equally on top. Most apps support custom percentages; just lock the percentages into the rent template and reuse monthly.
Is Splitwise still worth paying for in 2026?
Splitwise Pro costs US$ 4.99/month or US$ 49.99/year in 2026, which buys unlimited expenses per day, receipt scanning, and charts. For a roommate group adding 1 to 5 expenses a month, the free tier still works most months despite the new daily limits. Pay for Pro if you also use it for travel groups or you really lean on receipt scanning.
What is the best free app to split bills with roommates?
Tricount by Bunq is the strongest free app for roommates in 2026. It removed the old Premium tier so the entire feature set is free: unlimited groups, unlimited expenses, multi-currency, custom splits by share or by percentage. SettleUp's free tier and Splid (no signup, full offline) are credible alternatives if you want something even leaner.
How should one roommate handle paying everything and getting reimbursed?
Designated-payer is fine if you fix a monthly Venmo or Pix transfer date. Calculate each roommate's full share once at lease signing (rent, utilities estimate, internet, cleaning), round up R$ 30 or US$ 20 for buffer, and they pay that exact number on the 25th. Reconcile every 90 days against actual bills. Apps help here only as receipts.
How do you split rent with roommates who pay in different currencies?
Lock a planning FX rate at lease signing. If rent is R$ 4,500 in São Paulo and one roommate pays in USD, fix USD/BRL at, say, R$ 5.00 for the year. The USD share is computed from R$ 1,500 at R$ 5.00 = US$ 300/month, even if the spot rate moves to R$ 5.30 or R$ 4.70. Reconcile the rate annually. Capi Together does this natively; most apps require manual conversion.
What's the difference between Splitwise and Tricount for roommates?
Splitwise has a running ledger that accumulates balances across months and a "simplify debts" algorithm; Pro tier handles unlimited expenses and receipts. Tricount has discrete tricounts (one per shared context: apartment, trip, garage) and is fully free with no Premium tier since Bunq killed it. Roommates with one ongoing apartment are better with Splitwise's ledger; roommates with three separate shared contexts prefer Tricount.
Does Capi Together work for splitting rent with roommates?
Yes if your roommates already use Telegram. Capi Together adds a shared Telegram chat for the apartment, every expense posted by anyone shows up to all, monthly summary auto-generated, multi-currency native (useful for expat roommates), US$ 99/year for the group. It's not built primarily as a Splitwise replacement; it's a money-tracking workspace that happens to handle roommate splits.
Split rent and shared bills inside Telegram with Capi Together.
Shared chat for the apartment, multi-currency native, monthly summary auto-generated. US$ 99/year for the whole group. Free tier for solo use unlimited transactions/month.
Try Capi free on Telegram →