Legal
Privacy policy
Short version: the calculators run entirely inside your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, logged or stored anywhere. The only data that leaves your device is the ordinary traffic data any website and its advertising partners receive, described in full below.
Last updated: 24 July 2026
Who runs this site
The Actual Cost is operated by tvnews.ie, at [email protected]. If you have a question about anything on this page, that address is the way to reach a human.
Important disclaimer
The calculators and information on this site are provided for guidance purposes only. They are intended to give you a rough sense of the numbers involved in common financial decisions and should not be taken as financial, legal or tax advice.
The figures produced by these calculators are estimates based on the inputs you provide and simplified assumptions. They may not reflect your exact circumstances, and they may occasionally be incorrect. Tax rates, entitlements, costs and regulations change and the calculators may not always reflect the most current figures.
Before making any significant financial decision - including but not limited to salary negotiations, property purchases, investment choices, childcare arrangements or employment decisions - you should consult a qualified financial advisor, accountant or solicitor who can assess your individual situation. Nothing on this site replaces that professional advice.
What the calculators do with your figures
Every calculator on this site is written in JavaScript that runs on your own device. Salaries, mortgage figures, commute times and everything else you enter stay in your browser's memory for as long as the tab is open and are discarded when you close it. They are never sent to a server, never written to a database, and never seen by anyone including us. There are no accounts, no sign-ups, and no saved sessions.
Cookies and similar technologies
The site itself does not set tracking cookies. Third parties acting on its behalf do, in two categories:
Advertising
Advertising on this site is served by Google AdSense and its partner networks. Google and its partners use cookies and similar identifiers to serve ads, to limit how often you see the same ad, and in some cases to personalise ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and elsewhere on the internet.
You can turn off personalised advertising at any time in Google Ad Settings. To opt out of personalised advertising across a wider set of vendors, use aboutads.info or Your Online Choices in the EU and UK. Opting out reduces relevance; it does not remove ads.
Third-party vendors and ad networks other than Google may also serve ads on this site and may set their own cookies, subject to their own privacy policies.
Analytics
If analytics are installed, they are used only in aggregate: page views, referring sites, broad country-level location, device type, to work out which calculators are worth expanding. No analytics data is linked to anything you enter into a calculator, because that data never leaves your device in the first place.
Your rights under GDPR and similar laws
If you are in the EU, UK, or another region with comparable law, you have the right to access, correct, or request deletion of personal data held about you, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with your national data protection authority. In practice this site holds no personal data about you that could be retrieved or deleted. There is no account, no email list, and no stored input. Requests relating to advertising identifiers are best directed at Google using the settings links above, since those identifiers belong to Google rather than to this site. You can still write to the contact address with any request and it will be answered.
Where consent is required for advertising cookies, it is collected through Google's certified consent management platform before personalised ads are served.
California residents
This site does not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA. Advertising partners may collect identifiers as described above; the opt-out links in the advertising section are the mechanism for limiting that.
Children
This site is aimed at adults making financial decisions and is not directed at children under 13. No information is knowingly collected from them.
Not financial advice
Everything here is general information and arithmetic, not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. The output of a calculator is only as good as the figures and assumptions fed into it, and assumptions about growth rates, inflation and property values are estimates rather than predictions. Decisions you make with these numbers are yours.
External links
Pages may link to other sites. Their content and privacy practices are their own responsibility, not ours.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, most likely because an advertising or analytics provider is added or removed, the updated version replaces this one on this page, with a revised date at the top.