The Rhode Island Standard of Need (RISN) report presents data on how much it costs Rhode Islanders to meet their basic needs. The data for the report come from the Family Budget Calculator (FBC) produced by our national partners, the Economic Policy Institute: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/.
Now, you too can go directly to the source and play with the calculator yourself. You can look up different family sizes, with one or two adults and zero to four children. The data are available for counties in Rhode Island and across the United States, as well as for metropolitan areas, such as the Providence/Fall River Metro Area.*
*Please note that although the RISN report uses population-weighted FBC data to calculate basic needs budgets for Rhode Island as a whole, the FBC itself does not provide state-level data. Also, due to some methodological changes, some of the numbers, including tax numbers presented in the report do not match what the online calculator shows. Finally, once the calculator is updated in 2025 with a new year’s worth of data, the online numbers will altogether no longer match what is presented in the report. After that update, we plan to issue a supplement that will update the state data and other tables from the 2024 report.