Second Hand Clothing Savings Calculator

Second-hand clothing economics

The saving on any single garment is the gap between what it costs new and what the same thing costs used, and that gap is set by a secondary market rather than by a discount policy. Condition, brand, season and how quickly the style dates all move it, which is why the discount on a plain t-shirt and on a heavily marked-down coat look nothing alike. This calculator takes both prices from you and multiplies the gap by how often you buy, so the answer describes your own wardrobe rather than an average one.

Typical price comparisons

Rather than quoting prices that would be wrong in most markets within a year, the useful figure is the ratio: what the used price is as a share of the new one for the kind of thing you actually buy. That ratio is far from uniform. Durable outerwear, denim and knitwear resell well and hold their usefulness, so the swap works cleanly. Categories bought new almost universally, underwear, swimwear and performance footwear among them, cannot be swapped at all, and that matters more than it first appears: the calculator assumes every purchase moves to second-hand, so a wardrobe where a third of purchases have to be new lands roughly a third below the headline figure.

Worked example for a typical shopper

Three items a month, 50 new against 15 used, over ten years. The saving per item is 35, monthly savings are 105, annual savings are 1,260, and the ten-year total is 12,600. Worth putting that against the totals it comes from: 360 items over the decade would cost 18,000 bought new and 5,400 bought used, so the saving is 70% of what the new route would have cost. It is a large proportion of a spending line rather than a large amount of new money, and it only materialises if the purchases would genuinely have happened either way.

What the calculator does not model

Shipping and platform fees on online resale, which fall on the smaller price and so eat proportionally more of it. Time, since sorting through a rail or a search listing takes longer than a shop with everything in stock. Availability, because a specific size in a specific style may simply not exist used. And durability, which is the one that can reverse the result: if used garments reach end of life sooner, the replacement rate rises, and buying twice as often at a third of the price is no saving at all. Nothing here is discounted either, so a saving in year ten counts the same as one today.

The environmental side, with figures

Buying used displaces new production, and the scale of what is displaced is documented rather than guessed. According to the European Parliament's summary of textile impacts, textile purchases in the EU in 2022 generated about 355 kg of CO2 emissions per person, the equivalent of 1,800 km driven in a standard petrol car, a single cotton t-shirt takes an estimated 2,700 litres of fresh water to produce, around 12 kg of clothing per person is discarded each year, and between 4% and 9% of textile products placed on the European market are destroyed without ever being used. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation's A New Textiles Economy sets out the circular alternative these figures argue for. Those are regional numbers from one market, and the financial result this calculator produces is separate from them: the money saved and the production displaced are two different accounts.