Tools
How much emergency cash should you keep on hand?
When the power goes out, card readers and ATMs go with it — and the money in your bank account may as well not exist for a few days. Ready.gov’s financial preparedness guidance puts small bills in the emergency kit for exactly that reason. Pick the emergency you’re planning for and get a number sized to your household.
Your situation
What are you planning for?
You may evacuate ahead of landfall and return to an area where power, ATMs, and card readers are down for days. Fuel and lodging dominate the spend.
Who’s covered
This is not your emergency fund.
An emergency savings account covers months of lost income and belongs in a bank. This is physical cash for the days when the power, the card network, or the ATMs are down and the money in that account is unreachable. Most households need both, and they are sized by completely different math.
Cash to keep on hand
Where that number comes from
- Fuel — 2 full tanks$110
- Lodging — 3 nights$450
- Food & essentials — 3 people × 7 days$378
- Pet food & boarding — 1 × 7 days$56
- Supplies, ice, fuel cans, small repairs$120
Bill mix — small denominations matter
- $20 bills25 ×
- $10 bills28 ×
- $5 bills45 ×
- $1 bills113 ×
About $1,118 in mixed bills. A cashier running a manual register during an outage often can’t break a $50 or $100 — and a $20 for a $4 purchase means losing the change.
Where to keep it
- Home, in a fireproof pouch$675
- Vehicle glovebox or console$280
- Go-bag, sealed in a zip bag$170
How we calculate this: each scenario models what households actually spend cash on during it — fuel at roughly $55 a tank, lodging at $150 a night, about $18 per person and $8 per pet per day for food and essentials, plus $120 for supplies, ice, and small repairs. The range spans 80% to 135% of that midpoint, because regional prices and how long systems stay down both vary. These are planning figures, not a guarantee, and cash kept at home is not insured — keep enough to get through the gap, not enough to make the house a target.