How we calculate

Seven areas of everyday life:

• Food: your main meal each day, how often you eat out, and how much food is wasted
• Commute and travel: how you travel to work each day and how far, counting the journey there and back, plus other regular weekly travel and long journeys by land. For long journeys we work out the distance from the two towns: the straight line between them plus 25% for the way roads and railways wind (town locations from GeoNames, geonames.org). If you own a car, we add a share of making it: the emissions of building a car of that size and fuel (ICCT, 2021) spread over 14 years, a typical UK car's life, and split between the people who share it. If you give your yearly mileage, any miles your commute and trips don't already cover count as other driving, using UK government factors for your car's size and fuel
• Flights: each flight's distance between airports and the cabin class
• Home energy: electricity and gas use, whether you're on a green tariff, shared across your household
• Water: household water use, shared across your household
• Pets: the footprint of feeding dogs and cats
• Banking and pensions: the emissions your bank and pension fund finance with your money

Some things aren't measured yet, including shopping, other heating fuels, drinks and snacks, and services such as insurance and phone contracts. For shopping we add a typical UK figure under your total (see below), and public services and infrastructure are shown separately as your shared footprint.

For each answer we take the activity (a kilowatt-hour of gas, a kilometre by car, a beef meal, a long-haul flight in economy) and multiply it by a typical published emission factor for that activity, measured in kilograms of CO₂-equivalent. CO₂-equivalent includes other greenhouse gases such as methane from livestock.

Weekly habits are scaled up to a year, and household energy, water and pets are shared between the people you live with. Flight distances are calculated between the two airports, with an allowance for real-world routing.

Food is counted a whole day at a time. Vegan, vegetarian and fish days use the measured daily footprints of each diet group in Choręziak & Rzymski (2025, Nutrients). A meat day is a vegetarian day plus a 150 g portion of that meat, using Poore & Nemecek's (2018, Science) global averages per kilogram.

Banks lend out your savings, and pension funds invest in companies. A share of those companies' emissions is counted as yours, in proportion to the money involved. This is known as financed emissions.

Bank figures come from MotherTree's 2021 analysis of UK banks' financed emissions.

Pension figures come from each provider's own climate report (TCFD report), using the carbon footprint of its default fund, the fund most savers are in. These cover the companies' direct and energy-related emissions (Scope 1 and 2). Where we couldn't get a provider's current figure, or you're not sure who your provider is, we use an average across the largest UK workplace pension schemes. We refresh these figures as providers publish new reports.

Many UK-average figures include things this survey doesn't ask about, so comparing your total with them would be misleading. Instead we build a typical UK resident's answers to the same survey from official statistics, and run them through exactly the same calculations:

• Home energy: Ofgem's typical household gas and electricity use, and ONS household sizes
• Food: Defra's Family Food survey of what households buy each week
• Commuting: the Department for Transport's National Travel Survey
• Flights: ONS figures on trips abroad by UK residents
• Water: Consumer Council for Water figures on daily use per person
• Pets: UK Pet Food's pet population figures

The comparison covers food, commuting, flights, home energy, water and pets. Banking and pensions aren't included, because there's no reliable per-person UK figure for them. Where official data doesn't exist (for example, how often people eat out), we use a reasonable assumption.

Shopping isn't part of the survey yet, so under your total we add a typical UK figure of about 1.0 tonnes a year. It comes from the government's official carbon footprint figures for what UK households spend on clothes and shoes, household goods (furniture, appliances, homeware), electronics and phones, and hobbies and leisure, split across the whole population. It's the same for everyone until shopping is added to the survey.

Some emissions belong to everyone in the UK together: the NHS, schools, councils and defence, and the roads, buildings and equipment the country invests in. The government's official carbon footprint figures split these across the whole population, which comes to about 2.4 tonnes per person a year. We show it as a fixed line under your total, because it's the same for everyone and your answers don't change it.

Together with what the survey measures, this brings your figure closer to the full UK average of about 10 tonnes per person. Some spending, like insurance, phone contracts and other services, isn't in the survey yet.

To keep global warming to 1.5°C, lifestyle footprints need to fall to about 2.5 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per person a year by 2030 (Hot or Cool Institute). The budget covers food, home, travel, goods and leisure, but not banks and pensions or public services, so we compare like with like: your survey without money, plus typical shopping. Your bank and pension are shown on their own. What's in the budget and how we compare

To make tonnes easier to picture, the results page compares your footprint with everyday things. By weight: Liz Truss's lettuce (the Daily Star's iceberg, about 0.5 kg), and typical adults of some unusual animals, from a 100 g axolotl to a 1.3-tonne narwhal, plus an Argentinosaurus (an estimated 70 tonnes). As a gas: CO₂ weighs about 1.87 kg a cubic metre (at 15°C at sea level), so a tonne fills a cube about 8 m tall, which we measure in published heights: Danny DeVito (1.47 m), Abraham Lincoln (1.93 m), a London double-decker bus (4.38 m) and a giraffe (about 5.5 m). They're for fun and scale, not precision.

For each area we show two figures: what a realistic change would save, and the most you could save going all the way.

Realistic changes:

• Flights: if you take several long-haul flights, keeping one in economy; swapping a single long-haul trip for a shorter one; taking the train for trips up to 700 km, keeping one of those flights if you take three or more; and flying other trips up to 4,000 km in economy
• Commute and travel: walking or cycling on driving days for journeys up to 10 km, or train or bus for longer ones, and the train for long journeys you'd otherwise drive
• Food: swapping the highest-impact meals for lower-impact ones, tailored to your diet
• Home energy: switching to a renewable electricity tariff
• Water and pets: using less water, and choosing lower-impact pet food
• Banking and pensions: moving savings to a bank that doesn't fund fossil fuels, and choosing a climate-focused pension fund

Going all the way:

• Flights: not flying
• Commute and travel: no travel emissions, by working from home, walking and cycling, and holidaying closer to home
• Food: a fully plant-based diet with little waste
• Home energy: a renewable tariff plus a heat pump instead of gas
• Water and pets: bigger cuts in water use, and alternative-protein pet food

Savings are capped so no area can save more than it emits.

We update the figures as soon as new data is published. Figures last updated: Oct 22, 2026. Your results keep the figures from when you took the survey; your next survey uses the latest ones.

No changes since the figures were last checked on Oct 22, 2026.

• These are estimates from typical factors, not measurements of your actual bills, journeys or purchases.
• Financed emissions are counted using the industry's standard approach, which also counts them in other people's footprints, so they're best read on their own.
• Pension figures cover only companies' direct and energy emissions, not their supply chains or the use of their products, which can be much larger.
• Published data is updated over time. We review sources regularly, and figures may change as better data becomes available.