PE Equipment Budget Calculator

This calculator estimates what it costs to fully equip a PE program based on your largest class size and how many activity types you offer. It works from a fixed internal catalog of ten common equipment categories (basketballs, soccer balls, volleyballs, footballs, jump ropes, cones, pinnies, hula hoops, mats, and resistance bands), each with a typical unit cost and a sharing ratio — how many students one item can serve at once (for example, one basketball per two students). Increasing "Activity Types Offered" simply pulls more categories from that list in the order they're defined, so it's a proxy for curriculum breadth rather than a menu you choose from directly. For each included category, the calculator computes how many units are needed to serve your largest class simultaneously (students divided by the sharing ratio, rounded up) and multiplies by unit cost to get that category's outfit cost; summing across categories gives the total initial equipment investment.

The annual replacement cost is not derived from each item's individual lifespan — instead it applies your entered "Annual Replacement %" directly against the total initial cost, so a higher replacement percentage always scales the yearly figure proportionally. Budget coverage (in years) divides your entered annual budget by that replacement cost, and cost-per-student divides it by your total daily student throughput (class size times sections per day). Storage space is a rough rule of thumb of half a square foot per item. Because the equipment list and unit prices are fixed averages, treat every dollar figure as a starting estimate to adjust against your district's actual vendor pricing and curriculum mix.