A standard budget is a household budget that lists the goods and services that a family of a specified size and composition would need to live at a designated level of well-being, together with the costs of those goods and services.
[1] Considerable work on standard budgets has been done in the United States and other countries in recent years, mostly by non-government analysts.
Budgets have not been used to develop official poverty lines, and in most cases have not been used to calculate the size of a nation’s low-income population.
The main way a standard budget is established is by using historical information.
If standards are set using historical information, they may become out of date quickly.