Israel will pay you real money to come. It arrives on a schedule, the schedule has an end, and the end comes earlier than most families plan for. Here is your first eighteen months, told as the checks the state will write you.
You land at Ben Gurion and someone hands you money in the terminal. For the next six months more of it arrives in your new Israeli bank account, on schedule, without your having to ask. The support is real, and by the standards of any country's immigration policy it is generous.
It also ends, and the smaller benefit that takes over ends too. This page walks through the first eighteen months the way your bank account will experience them: what comes in, what goes out, and what is left when both benefits are gone.
The standard guides describe each benefit on its own page, with its own rules, and none of them lays the timeline end to end. Laid end to end, it reads like a bank statement, so that is how this page draws it.
The absorption basket, sal klita, Hebrew for a basket of absorption, reaches you in three pieces: cash at the airport, a larger transfer once you open an Israeli bank account, and then six monthly deposits. For a couple in 2026 the whole sequence is worth about 39,000 shekels. Each child adds somewhere between 7,300 and 10,900 depending on age, and a household of six or more picks up a supplement of about 5,000.
For a family of six that adds up to between 73,000 and 80,500 shekels across the first six months, about 24,000 to 27,000 dollars. That is real money, and it is also, as the statement below shows, roughly six months of what your household will spend.
About these numbers
No official English table of the 2026 amounts has been published, so the family total here is a careful estimate assembled from the current published pieces. Your exact figure will differ a little with your children's ages, and the older calculators still circulating online show amounts several years out of date, so do not be surprised when they disagree.
Below is the whole sequence, printed the way your bank will report it. Money in is what the state deposits that month. Money out is what a family of six spends renting a five-room apartment in the towns where English speakers actually settle. The balance column carries whatever is left, measured from the day you land.
Read it top to bottom and watch the deposits shrink twice while the withdrawals never move.
Your first eighteen months, as a bank statement
Family of six, shekels, before setup costs. Negative balances in parentheses.
| Month | Deposits | In | Out | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Airport and bank-opening payments | 19,213 | — | 19,213 |
| 1 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 17,264 |
| 2 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 15,315 |
| 3 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 13,366 |
| 4 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 11,417 |
| 5 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 9,468 |
| 6 | Absorption basket and child allowance | 11,051 | 13,000 | 7,519 |
| the absorption basket ends | ||||
| 7 | Income support and child allowance | 5,230 | 13,000 | (251) |
| 8 | Income support, child allowance, rent assistance | 5,632 | 13,000 | (7,619) |
| 9 | Income support, child allowance, rent assistance | 5,632 | 13,000 | (14,987) |
| 10 | Income support, child allowance, rent assistance | 5,632 | 13,000 | (22,355) |
| 11 | Income support, child allowance, rent assistance | 5,632 | 13,000 | (29,723) |
| 12 | Income support, child allowance, rent assistance | 5,632 | 13,000 | (37,091) |
| income support ends | ||||
| 13 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 (arnona begins) | (48,981) |
| 14 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 | (60,871) |
| 15 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 | (72,761) |
| 16 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 | (84,651) |
| 17 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 | (96,541) |
| 18 | Child allowance and rent assistance | 1,630 | 13,520 | (108,431) |
One line is deliberately missing. In month zero you also write about 107,600 shekels of checks that appear on no benefits page: three months of rent up front, an agent's fee of one month plus tax, appliances and furniture for an empty apartment, temporary housing while you look, and the shipping container. More on that container later.
Now take just the balance column and draw it on the ledger page. You arrive with savings, the airport payment tops them up, and every month the gap between what goes out and what comes in is withdrawn. The line starts at plus 19,200 shekels and records where the account stands relative to the day you landed.
The account crosses zero in month seven and never comes back
Running balance from the statement above, drawn on the ledger page, setup costs excluded
The second bend is the one worth planning around. In month thirteen your continuing support from the Israeli state is the child allowance, 830 shekels a month for four children, plus rental assistance of 800. That is 1,630 shekels against outgoings of about 13,500.
Twelve percent. That is what the state is still sending in the thirteenth month, and it is the number the aliyah literature never puts next to the generous ones.
Because of an eligibility rule that a new immigrant cannot satisfy no matter what they do. Israel's National Insurance Institute requires twelve months of salaried work, with contributions paid, out of the eighteen months before a claim. The rule is not aimed at immigrants, and it still cannot be met by someone whose first eighteen months in the Israeli labour market began after they landed.
Think of it as a stamp booklet. Every month someone in your household works, one stamp. A claim in month thirteen needs twelve. The booklet below runs every possible start date: each row is a family whose first pay cheque came in that month, and the filled stamps are the contributions they hold when month thirteen arrives.
Only a job that began in the arrival month fills the booklet
National insurance contributions held at month 13, one stamp per working month, twelve required
Regular Israeli income support, the benefit that would normally catch a family here, has its own twelve-month residency requirement. It becomes available in the same month the immigrant benefit expires, and only if you pass a means test that a household still living on savings may fail.
A family that made aliyah in 2020 got a basket that looks almost the same as yours on paper, and theirs bought more. For the three household categories where both the 2020 amounts and the 2026 amounts are fully public, here are the checks the ministry writes in 2026, each stamped with how far it falls short of its own 2020 value.
Every 2026 check comes up short
The absorption basket total in 2026, against the 2020 amount adjusted for Israeli prices
Israeli prices rose about 19 percent between January 2020 and mid 2026. The payment schedule rose about 10. In the things your family will buy with the money, the basket is worth about 7.5 percent less than it was six years ago. If you run into a claim that the basket itself rose 17 percent, that is the inflation number wearing the wrong label.
Rental assistance is the benefit with the longest tail. It begins in month eight and runs up to five years, which makes it sound like the programme that carries you past the cliff. So ask a blunter question of it: when you write the rent check each month, how much of it is the state's money?
Each stub below is your monthly rent check in a town where olim actually move. The blue sliver is the state's share.
Rental assistance pays the rent until about the second of the month
Average asking rents, early 2026, against the monthly assistance for a family
Beit Shemesh, the cheapest of the three towns here, saw four-room rents rise 8.3 percent in a single year, the sharpest jump of any city surveyed. The assistance is fixed in shekels and does not move with the market it is meant to offset.
This is the biggest number nobody will tell you in advance. The movers who serve the aliyah market decline to quote flat rates, and every guide that promises costs turns out to explain the process instead. One of the most thorough industry guides published this year contains exactly two figures in the whole piece: an insurance minimum of twelve dollars a pound, and the eighteen percent tax charged on the services performed inside Israel.
So here is the invoice rebuilt from its parts. Each row is one line item for a forty-foot container from the American east coast, and each bar runs from the lowest published figure for that item to the highest, so the width of the bar is honest uncertainty rather than decoration.
The invoice nobody will quote, reconstructed line by line
Door-to-door container move, US east coast to Israel, published low to high range per component, dollars
The 1,700 to 3,400 dollars you may have heard for a container is a real freight rate for a twenty-foot box out of New York or New Jersey. It is accurate, and it is the smallest line on the invoice. Everything else is labour, handling, insurance and tax, and the Israeli-side share carries a tax that the American-side share does not. Budget from the bottom line, never from the freight quote.
Setup at arrival comes to about 107,600 shekels. The month-by-month shortfall across the first year adds another 37,100. If nobody in the household works at all, reaching the end of year one takes about 144,700 shekels of your own money, roughly 48,200 dollars, and reaching month eighteen takes about 216,000, roughly 72,000.
A leaner version of the same move, renting in Beit Shemesh rather than Jerusalem, buying secondhand and shipping nothing, needs about 54,000 shekels or 18,000 dollars to reach month twelve. The distance between those two numbers is most of what your budget conversation should actually be about.
And then the comparison you are actually weighing. Put your month-thirteen statement next to the one you would get if you never left.
The thirteenth month in Israel costs less than half the thirteenth month in America
Monthly household outgoings, family of six with four school-age children, dollars
The cliff is real, and the ground below it sits far beneath where the support was. That same ground still costs less than half of what you are standing on now. Both of those things are true, and the guides tend to tell you only one of them at a time.
Income support for months seven through twelve is never paid retroactively. The application has to go in during the seventh month, which is likely to be the month your youngest starts school, your ulpan is in full swing, and the car breaks. Miss the window and you forfeit up to 26,400 shekels.
How many families miss it? Nobody publishes the number. Not the ministry that pays the benefit, and not the agencies that guide olim through their first year. A benefit that cannot be claimed late, that opens in the single most chaotic month of your landing, and whose take-up nobody measures, deserves a reminder set on an American phone before the flight. Set it now.
Israel's support for new immigrants is real, it arrives without much friction, and in the first six months it very nearly covers a household. It also has a defined end, and the end comes before the things it was meant to bridge to: the free ulpan runs about 500 hours and has to begin within eighteen months, relicensing an American profession usually takes longer than that, and unemployment insurance requires a work history the calendar makes impossible. In the thirteenth month a family of six with no earnings receives 1,630 shekels against outgoings of about 13,500, and the main thing keeping you solvent is whatever you brought.
So plan the move against month thirteen rather than month one, and hold two facts at once while you do. The basket has been shrinking in real terms for six years while everyone keeps calling it generous, and the month you are dreading still costs less than half what the same month costs in Teaneck. The second fact is the reason the first one is survivable.
Method and caveats
The family drawn here is two adults and four children, two under four and two of school age, arriving with no work lined up and finding none for eighteen months. That is the stress case rather than the typical case, drawn deliberately: the benefit schedule is the same for everyone, and only the stress case shows where it ends. Every month someone in your household earns moves the whole picture up.
Basket amounts are the current 2026 published figures for adults, with the per-child amounts taken from the most complete English rate table available, which is several years old. The family-of-six total is therefore an estimate, and the ministry's own current table is the only place to confirm your exact number. Rents are official Israeli quarterly averages for early 2026, as reported in the Israeli press. The checks, statements and booklets drawn on this page are illustrations of the published amounts rather than images of real documents; in practice the money arrives by bank transfer.
Monthly outgoings of 13,000 shekels are built as rent 6,000, utilities 1,200, food 4,000, school payments 500, transport 600, health 300 and 400 for everything else. From month thirteen a further 520 is added for arnona, the municipal property tax, because the ninety percent discount new immigrants receive runs twelve months and most households use it in year one. Income support is taken at 4,400 shekels a month, the top of the published 1,524 to 4,400 band, since a family of six sits at the top of it. Child allowance is the 2026 schedule, 173 shekels for a first child and 219 for each of the next three. Rental assistance is 402 a month in months eight through twelve and 800 in year two. The days-of-rent figures divide the assistance by the average rent and multiply by a thirty-one day month.
The shipping table uses published ranges for each component and is not a quote. Tax at eighteen percent is applied only to the destination handling, customs clearing and delivery lines, since it attaches to services performed inside Israel. Before you sign with a mover, get at least three written door-to-door quotes and compare them against this table line by line, because the cheap headline number is usually the freight alone.
The American column uses roughly 6,500 dollars per child in day school, which is what families on reduced tuition typically pay, against posted tuitions of about 17,000 out of town and 28,485 in the northeast. Food is the standard American moderate-cost food plan scaled to a family of six with a kosher premium. Health insurance is the worker's share of the average employer family premium, 6,850 dollars a year, before any deductible. Shekels convert at 3.00 to the dollar, the August 2026 average.
One caution if you are over 40 or under 25: a single source claims first-time claimants in those brackets can qualify for unemployment insurance on six months of contributions rather than twelve. The official pages do not mention this, so ask the National Insurance Institute directly rather than planning around it.
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for. The work comes in seasons. This page belongs to the aliyah cost series. It states its own sources, sample sizes and limits.
Also: Season 1 — Jewish Education · Season 2 — Household Affordability · Season 3 — Federation and Charitable Giving · Season 4 — Aliyah and Living in Israel
The family-of-six absorption basket figure is an estimate assembled from a 2026 adult schedule and an older child schedule, and is flagged as such in the text. The shipping invoice is assembled from published component ranges, not from solicited quotes. The checks and statements are illustrations, not real documents.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.