How Much Spending Money Do You Need on a China Tour?

It is the first practical question almost every traveller asks once the big decision is made: the flights and the tour are booked, the passport is current — but how much spending money do you actually need in China? Nobody wants to run short halfway through a Li River cruise, and nobody wants to carry a wallet full of yuan they cannot spend or convert back at the end. This guide gives Australian travellers a realistic picture, in Australian dollars, of what life on the ground costs — the meals that are not included, the tips, the shopping stops, the small comforts — so you can plan with confidence and relax once you are there.

The short answer

For most travellers on a fully guided tour, a comfortable budget is A$50 to A$80 per person per day, spent on the things your tour fare does not cover. That covers a relaxed meal on your free evenings, tips for your guide and driver, snacks, bottled water, laundry now and then, and modest souvenirs. Travellers who enjoy a pre-dinner drink, an occasional optional show and a few nicer gifts might edge closer to A$100 a day. Keen shoppers — the jade, silk, pearl and carpet connoisseurs among us — should treat shopping as a separate budget entirely, because that number is personal, not average.

If you would rather think in totals: on a ten-day tour, somewhere between A$500 and A$1,000 in spending money covers almost everyone who is not on a major shopping mission. China remains one of the better-value destinations in Asia for Australians — an Australian dollar typically buys between four and five Chinese yuan, and day-to-day costs outside the five-star hotels are genuinely modest.

What your tour fare already covers

Before you budget for spending money, it helps to be clear about what you have already paid for. On a fully guided ExploreChina Holidays tour, the big-ticket items are bundled into your fare: your hotels, your transport within China, your English-speaking national and local guides, entry fees to the sights on your itinerary, and most of your meals. The exact inclusions for each departure are listed on the tour pages at https://www.explorechinaholidays.com.au/, and your pre-departure documents set them out meal by meal.

In practice, this is why the spending-money question is smaller than many first-time travellers fear. You are not budgeting for accommodation or getting from Beijing to Xi'an to Shanghai — that is done. You are budgeting for the enjoyable margins of the trip: the dinner you choose yourself, the foot massage after a long day on the Great Wall, the packet of tea you want to bring home, and the tips. That is a much more pleasant calculation.

The four things you will actually spend money on

1. Meals that are not included

Most itineraries include the majority of meals — typically breakfast daily plus a generous share of lunches and dinners featuring regional specialities: Peking duck in Beijing, dumplings in Xi'an, Shanghai-style braises. The meals left open are usually free evenings, deliberately, so you can explore. This is where your food budget goes.

And here is the good news: eating well in China is remarkably inexpensive by Australian standards. A steaming bowl of hand-pulled noodles at a local shop in a Beijing hutong might cost 20 to 30 yuan — roughly A$5 to A$7. Dinner at a clean, busy local restaurant might run 60 to 120 yuan per person (A$13 to A$25) with a beer or a pot of tea. Even a nice restaurant near the Bund in Shanghai usually lands well below what the equivalent meal costs in Sydney or Melbourne. Budget A$20 to A$40 for a free-evening dinner and you will eat very well indeed; street snacks — a jianbing crepe for breakfast, lamb skewers in the Xi'an Muslim Quarter — cost loose change.

2. Tips for your guide and driver

Tipping is not part of everyday Chinese culture — nobody tips in a local restaurant or a taxi. On Western-style guided tours, however, tipping your national guide, local guides and driver is an established courtesy, and it is how much of their income is made. A common approach for Australian travellers is around A$10 to A$15 per travelling day in total, shared across the guide and driver team, often collected toward the end of the tour. Your tour documents will state exactly what your departure recommends, and the tour leader will usually explain the practicalities on day one — so you never have to guess in the moment. It is worth building this into your daily figure rather than treating it as a surprise.

3. Shopping stops and souvenirs

Group itineraries in China traditionally include visits to workshops — a jade factory, a silk spinning mill, a pearl market, a tea house, sometimes a carpet workshop. These stops are genuinely interesting even if you buy nothing: you see how silk is pulled from a cocoon, how jade is carved, how pearls are graded. You are never obliged to purchase anything, and your guide will not pressure you — but if you do fall in love with something, set your own ceiling before you walk in.

For souvenirs and gifts, many travellers find A$100 to A$300 across a whole trip is plenty: tea, silk scarves, small jade pieces, hand-painted bookmarks. If you are shopping for serious jade, pearls or carpets, that is a personal decision and a personal budget — pay by card for the protection, keep receipts, and remember quality varies enormously, which is exactly why the workshop visits with demonstrations are a sensible way to learn before you spend.

4. Personal extras

The small stuff adds the comfort: laundry in hotels (a few dollars a piece), extra bottles of water (a dollar or less from convenience stores), Wi-Fi or a local eSIM if you want data beyond what your Australian plan offers, an occasional optional evening show such as the acrobatics in Shanghai or the Tang Dynasty show in Xi'an (typically A$40 to A$80), a foot massage after a walking day (often A$15 to A$25 for a very good one). None of these are compulsory, and all of them are pleasant. This is the category where A$10 to A$20 a day quietly disappears if you say yes to everything — which, on holiday, you are allowed to.

Cash, cards and mobile payments in China

China is one of the most cashless countries on earth. Street vendors, taxis and noodle shops are all paid with a quick scan of a phone. For years this flummoxed foreign visitors; the good news is that it is now far easier. Both Alipay and WeChat Pay — the two dominant apps — accept international credit and debit cards, including Australian Visa and Mastercard cards. You download the app before you leave, link your card, and you can pay almost anywhere the locals do. For most travellers over sixty, the simplest path is to set up one of these apps with help from a family member before departure, then use it for occasional purchases while relying on cash for the small daily items.

Cash still matters, though. Notes are universally accepted, useful for markets and tips, and reassuring to have. The practical approach: bring a few hundred Australian dollars in cash and exchange it in China — at a bank, your hotel front desk, or the airport in a pinch — rather than buying yuan in Australia, where rates tend to be poorer. Exchange a little at a time, because converting unused yuan back to Australian dollars at the end of the trip requires your exchange receipts and is not always straightforward. Avoid changing large sums late in the trip.

As for plastic: tell your bank you are travelling, and expect Australian cards to work in hotels, larger shops and restaurants but not at the corner store. A card with no foreign transaction fees is worth having; a mix of one linked mobile wallet, some cash and one card is the combination that suits most of our travellers best.

A sample daily budget

Here is how the numbers look for three travelling styles, per person per day, on top of your tour fare:

Over a ten-day trip, that translates to roughly A$500 to A$1,000 of spending money for most travellers, with the shopping fund added on top if shopping is your thing. If you are considering a shorter, value-packed departure such as Amazing China, or a premium small-group experience like China in Crystal, the same daily logic applies to both — the spending-money question is about your days on the ground, not the style of the tour.

Money tips for older travellers

• Carry less than you think you need. Hotels have in-room safes, and China is a very safe country for visitors. A modest daily wallet plus backup in the safe beats carrying everything.
• Keep small notes. Ten-yuan and twenty-yuan notes are gold for markets, water and tips. Break your large notes at hotel desks.
• Set up mobile pay before you leave home. Doing it on the sofa with a family member nearby is far calmer than doing it in a Shanghai pharmacy.
• Keep every exchange receipt if you think you might convert yuan back at the end.
• Budget tips as a daily line, not a surprise. A$10–15 a day set aside removes the end-of-trip scramble.
• Ask your guide. Forty-one years of running China tours has taught us the guide's local knowledge is the most underused money-saving tool on the trip — where locals eat, what things should cost, which workshop items are fairly priced.

ExploreChina Holidays has been introducing Australian travellers to China since 1985, backed by China Travel Service — and in our experience, the travellers who enjoy the trip most are the ones who arrive knowing roughly what things cost, with a comfortable buffer, and then stop thinking about money altogether. That is the real point of a budget: once it is set, you are free to enjoy the wall, the warriors and the river.

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