Bali Budget Breakdown: What 2 Weeks in Paradise Actually Costs (By Category)

We all hear that traveling in southeast Asia is super affordable for those of us coming from the US (and other Western countries). But no one ever breaks down all the little details and expenses you need to prepare your own Bali budget.

My goal with this post is to show you exactly where I spent my money over a two and a half week trip to Bali, and to point out where you could splurge or save based on your own travel preferences.

We’ll dive into pre-trip expenses — some of which I hadn’t realized I’d need prior to booking my own trip — and what you can expect to spend on the ground for things like accommodations, food, activities, and more.

After you read this post, you’ll know exactly how much YOU should budget for your own trip to Bali, so you can be informed and prepared without having to stress about your wallet while you’re on your trip!

If this will be your first time in Bali, read my ultimate first timers’ guide to Bali to get all the details you’ll need to prep for an incredible trip!

Pre-Trip Expenses to Include in Your Bali Budget

As with any trip, you’ll want to factor the flight into your Bali budget, but for Bali specifically, you’ll also want to account for the cost of potential vaccines you’ll need as well as travel insurance and the travel visa.

Let’s dive into those details below.👇

Flights

Flights are going to vary significantly depending on where in the world you will be coming from.

I got a good deal on my flight by using my favorite email subscription — Going — $800 from the east coast of the US. I was sent a notification, and this was actually the reason my friend and I booked the trip!

If you don’t have the flexibility to wait for a great deal and can’t use points, reference the infographic below which outlines the rough costs from major hub airports in different regions around the world.

Note, I’ve looked at the largest 3-4 hubs in each region, so if you are coming from a smaller airport, your cost may be elevated.

If you’re based in the US, I highly recommend using a service like Going; it’s how I find all my flight deals!

Vaccines & Medications

Depending on where and when you are traveling to Bali and your medical history, you may need to plan for vaccines or medications in your Bali Budget.

On top of routine vaccines, my doctor recommended:

• a Typhoid vaccine
• a two-part Japanese Encephalitis vaccine
• a Polio vaccine booster
• and anti-malarial medication for my trip to Komodo National Park

However, my friend’s doctor only recommended the Japanese Encephalitis vaccines and anti-malarial medication for the same travel regions, so I probably didn’t need all of the vaccines I recieved for this specific trip.

Because there was only one travel clinic near my home, these vaccines ended up being extremely costly, about $1,500 for the whole set.💸

You’ll definitely want to plan for this pre-trip expense in your Bali budget. The good news is that these vaccines last for long periods of time, so they’ll can cover you for many trips to come!

Have a thourough discussion with your doctor about which vaccines you’ll need for your trip, and which ones are available in a regular clinic or pharmacy versus which will require a special trip to a (pricey) travel clinic.

Travel Insurance

Realistically, travel insurance is something you should have for every trip (and since my Indonesia trip, I’ve made sure to always have an active policy), but it wasn’t something I had thought about prior to this trip.

Whether you get a cut which gets infected, have an accident while riding a scooter, or have a flight cancelled on you at the last minute, travel insurance is something I would definitely recommend you look into prior to your trip.

You can find several different policy options with varying prices. I currently carry an annual policy for about $250 per year which covers all my trips. This is a great option if you do travel multiple times a year.

If you only need travel insurance for a single trip, you can look at an insurance aggregator, like VisitorsCoverage, which will give you options from several different companies. Putting in parameters similar to the Bali trip I took, it looks like you could find policies with premiums between $30-$100 USD depending on your coverage level.

Indonesian Travel Visa

The last pre-trip expense you’ll need to consider is the required Visa on Arrival (VOA).

If you’re coming from the US, you can purchase this 500K IDR (~$35 USD) VOA online before your trip or once you land and are going through customs.

My friend and I did this on the ground in Bali, and while it wasn’t too big of a hassle, it would have been easier to purchase the e-VOA online in advance. Also, while we didn’t get stuck in never-ending Customs lines, I have read stories from other travelers who were waiting for hours because they hadn’t pre-purchased the visa, so best to avoid that possibility and use the online option.

On-the-Ground Expenses to Include in Your Bali Budget

My friend and I had a mid-range budget for the trip, travelled during shoulder season in April, and ended up averaging $150 per person per day while on the ground in Bali.

If you’re traveling during peak season, you can expect accommodation pricing to be a bit higher, but otherwise, the rest of the costs should stay pretty stable.

I’ve broken those costs into four different categories so you can get a better idea of the types of expenses you’ll have while in Bali. Hopefully this helps you decide whether the same level of expenses make sense for your travel style or if there are places you would rather save or splurge.

Accommodations

I fully expected accommodations to be our largest expense in Bali, but having run the numbers for my own Bali budget, I was pleasantly surprised to find they weren’t!

We spent 17 nights in Indonesia. Of those nights we did:

• 13 nights in mid-range hotels in Bali, Nusa Lembongan, and the Gili Islands
• 1 night in a hostel in Labuan Bajo (prior to our Komodo National Park boat tour)
• 3 nights on our Komodo Island Boat Tour

Excluding the boat tour, which will be discussed later, we spent $325 per person on accommodations for this trip.

Here’s how our accommodations expenses broke down:

I’ve created a full accommodation guide for the different regions in Bali – use it to simplify your trip planning!

Hotels

The hotels were all mid-range hotels with beautiful rooms, on-site pools, and breakfast (typically) included! My friend and I shared a larger, multi-bed room for 4 of those nights and then each had a separate, double bed room for 9 nights.

On average, we spent $35 USD per hotel room per night.

If you want to save while having a private room, you could probably find some for about $20-$25 USD. Or, if you prefer splurging on your accommodation, you could easily find luxury hotels and resorts for $100+ USD.

Hostels

We stayed one night in a 6-bed dorm room at a hostel in Labuan Bajo prior to our 4D/3N boat tour from Komodo National Park to the Gili islands (more on the tour later).

This was a very nice hostel with a rooftop restaurant and bar, a gym, and a pool and cost us $15 USD per dorm bed.

Food

The food category also pleasantly surprised me when looking back at my Bali budget!

We typically ate the following meals each day:

• Early morning breakfast before our activities — mostly included with our accommodation
• Second breakfast — usually a Western-style meal in a cafe in the late morning after our first activities of the day
• Mid-day smoothie or iced coffee — to cool down from the heat
• Lunch — typically mid-afternoon we would find a local warung for a large meal
• Dinner — we did a mix of Western and local meals for dinner, but I would say about 70% of our evening meals were in local warungs
• Snack/Dessert — depending on the day we would usually grab another smoothie or ice cream at some point

Not only did we eat many meals, my friend was bulking which meant we often were splitting 3 meals among the two of us for lunch and dinner.

All of this to say… we ate A LOT each day, and the final cost for all of our food came out to about $155 per person for the ENTIRE trip which breaks down to about $12 a day per person.

This is a category where I definitely think you could cut costs even more if you ate more local meals or weren’t bulking during your trip. 😉

Activities

My friend and I planned a very active and adventurous Bali trip, and the budget varied widely depending on the day. This section will break down the 3 main types of activities we did on our trip.

Note: We DIYed a lot of our day trips by renting a scooter (only recommended if you are very confident driving a scooter); if you take group tours, your costs may differ!

GetYourGuide is a great option for finding tours. From my research, most group tours will cost $15-$50 USD per person, while private experiences will typically cost $50-$100USD per person.

Day Trips

There are so many day trips you can do around Bali, and we spent most of our days driving around the island (and the nearby islands as well!).

The two main expenses you’ll have for day trips are 1) entrance fees and 2) transportation.

Entrance Fees

For the trips we did, we typically paid 5K – 15K IDR (<$1 USD) per person, per entry fee. We were surprised by how many places had entrance fees as many of the blogs I had read to plan our trip didn’t mention these fees.

While we expected these fees for temples and very touristy view points, we didn’t expect them at the public beaches and waterfalls. While it was annoying to not have known about the fees ahead of time, they weren’t breaking the budget; I’d just make sure to be aware of them and to bring extra cash for your own day trips.

Getting Around

We’ll dive into this one a bit more in the next section, but your form transportation can really impact the cost of your day trip.

We did most of our day trips DIY-style, meaning we rented a scooter for about $5 USD per day and could take it everywhere, keeping our overall day trip costs lower.

HOWEVER, if you are not a confident driver on a scooter, or simply prefer not to deal with the bumpy roads, navigation, and A/C-less transportation, you’ll want to hire a private driver or join a group tour.

Both of these options will add to your day trip costs, anywhere from $30 – $60+ USD depending on the exact tour or day trip length.

Scuba Diving

The main reason we came to Bali and Indonesia (other than getting the cheap flight deal alert from Going 😉) was to experience the world-class scuba diving!

We found the cost was consistently $35-$40/tank regardless of which region we were diving. This included gear and dive computers, and was a great price for the incredible dive experiences we had!

If you have the opportunity to dive in Bali, you should absolutely include this in your budget planning. If you don’t have a scuba certification, you can even do the education at home before you go and then earn your certification while diving in Bali!

If you’re not a diver but still want to experience the wonderful marine life, I would plan for at least 1-2 days of snorkeling around the island. When researching snorkel day tours, it looked like they run ~$20-$50 USD per person based on snorkel location.

I’m going to be sharing our diving experiences in various parts of the island soon — so if you’re interested in scuba diving in Bali, come back and check out all the options!

Boat Tours

The final big activity we did was a 4D/3N boat tour from Flores to Lombok. This boat tour took us through Komodo National Park where we got to see the Komodo Dragon in its only habitat, snorkel through pristine waters, and hike to a secret waterfall!

We opted for a private room on the boat which cost 4,000K IDR (~$260 USD), but if you are interested in doing the same tour and want to spend a bit less, you can opt for the open deck (cabin class) for 3,500K IDR (~$215 USD).

We also had to fly one way from Bali to Flores Island, which cost us about $100 USD each. However, we waited to book until the last minute and you can typically find the same flight for about $60 USD each way.

This tour was so special as I’ve been dreaming of seeing the Komodo Dragons in person since I was in middle school — it was surreal to stand so close to them…and also slightly terrifying! 🫣

Even if you don’t have the time for the full tour we did, there are several, shorter tours that will make stops around the national park; I highly recommend adding a Komodo tour into your Bali itinerary!

Transportation

I briefly touched on this with the day trips, but let’s dive a little deeper into transportation costs:

Scooters

We rented a scooter in Nusa Lembongan, Nusa Penida, and Ubud and paid about $5/day in each of the locations.

If you’re already comfortable driving a scooter, this can be a great way to get around. We mostly used our scooters for day trips so we could plan our own stops and timing.

Within the cities and more populated areas, we mostly opted for Grab ride shares as they were super affordable (~$1-2 USD per ride) and meant we didn’t have to deal with the heavy traffic.

As much as I loved the freedom of a scooter, I would not recommend it for anyone who doesn’t have previous experience. While they can be easy to pick up, they can also be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing!

If you are considering renting a scooter while in Bali, make sure to read my post on 15 things you need to know prior to renting!

Private Drivers For Day Trips

If you’re craving the same sort of flexibility as you’d get with a DIY scooter day tour, but don’t want the hassle of dealing with the scooter itself, you should consider hiring a private driver for about $40 USD per day.

With a private driver, you’ll still be able to pick your own itinerary and have the flexibility to stay longer (or shorter) amounts of time at each stop.

If you’re in a large group, this can still be cost effective as you’re paying one price for the whole group.

Another option would be to find a group tour with an itinerary that works well for your interests and timing. Prices here can vary significantly depending on your specific tour, but I would recommend using GetYourGuide to get an idea of the various group tours available in Bali.

Airport & Long Distance Transfers

For longer transfers on the island — like coming from the airport and getting between the different regions — we used a mix of Klook airport transfers and taxis that we were able to book through our accommodation.

Something I didn’t think of doing until AFTER we had returned from our trip was hiring private drivers for the days we were transferring between hotels.

Long distance transfers can take a couple hours due to the heavy traffic, and if we had booked a private driver for these days, we could have included some cool stops between regions rather than just spending a day transferring.

We loved our Klook airport transfer! It was prompt, affordable, and a hassle-free way to start our trip in Bali!

Travel Between Islands

The last type of transportation expense you’ll want to consider for your Bali budget is travel to nearby islands.

We took ferries to Nusa Lembongan and Gili Air and paid ~$10 USD and ~$20 USD per person for one-way trips to each of those islands, respectively.

I definitely recommend taking the fast boats, and you can use a service like 12go to find the best option for your travel dates.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts on Bali Budget

While some of the pre-travel expenses can definitely add up for Bali, I found the time on the ground to be very affordable coming from the US.

For a two and a half week trip, a daily budget of $150 per person allowed us to stay in nice, mid-range hotels, eat tons of great food, and have some incredible experiences!

If you choose to stay in more budget accommodations or do fewer big ticket activities, you could definitely save money and get away with significantly less, around $50 per person per day.

Or, if you want to splurge — hiring private drivers daily, staying in luxury hotels and resorts, and eating at upscale restaurants — you could definitely rack up more costs.

If you’re ready to start planning your own 2-week trip to Bali, check out my upcoming blog post!