free template · no email required
Free Paycheck Budget Template for Google Sheets & Excel
The Payday One-Pager plans a single paycheck on a single tab: the bills this check covers, your spending money, savings, and the number that matters — what's left over. It's the five-minute version of budgeting by paycheck.
Works in Google Sheets & Excel · no signup, no watermark, actually free
What's in it
One paycheck, one plan
Enter the check that just landed and the bills due before the next one. No monthly averages, no guessing.
The left-over cell
Bills, spending, savings, and debt subtract themselves from the check. Goes red when you've over-committed — before your bank tells you.
Built-in instructions
The how-to lives on the sheet itself, four short lines. You will never need a tutorial video.
How to use it
- Download the file — the button above grabs the .xlsx.
- Google Sheets: drive.google.com → New → File upload → open it → File → Save as Google Sheets. Excel: just open it.
- Enter your paycheck — date and amount that actually landed.
- List only the bills due before your next check (that's the trick — future bills belong to future checks).
- Pick your spending, savings, and debt numbers and read the Left Over cell. That's the whole budget.
- The one rule: shaded cells are yours to type in. Everything else computes itself.
Questions
Is it really free?
Really. No email wall, no watermark, no trial. It's the single-tab version of our paid system, and it's genuinely useful on its own.
What's the difference vs The Payday System?
The One-Pager plans one check at a time, manually. The Payday System runs the same idea across every paycheck automatically — bill calendar with due-date warnings, a live safe-to-spend dashboard, spending log, savings goals, debt, and net worth.
Biweekly, weekly, irregular pay?
All fine. The template doesn't care when checks arrive — each one gets its own five-minute plan.
When one page isn't enough anymore.
The Payday System runs this exact method across all your paychecks with a bill calendar and a live safe-to-spend number. $29 once, yours forever.
See The Payday SystemRelated guides: How to budget by paycheck · Budgeting biweekly pay · The 5-minute method