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Categories tell you what kind of spending it is. Tags tell you what project, trip, or context it belongs to. A weeklong vacation has Restaurants charges, Gas charges, Hotel charges, and Shopping charges — all in different categories. Tagging them all "Summer Vacation 2026" lets you see the total trip cost without forcing them into one fake category.

Tags are a Premium feature in Rocket Money, and creation is mobile-only. This guide walks through the setup flow, the tag patterns that actually pay off, and how it compares to the more flexible tagging in YNAB and Monarch.

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Verified workflow (from Rocket Money Help Center)

  1. Open the Rocket Money mobile app (Premium required).
  2. Open a transaction.
  3. Create a tag — give it a name (e.g., "Summer Vacation 2026") and pick a color.
  4. Apply the tag to the transaction.
  5. Reuse tags across multiple transactions for flexible tracking.

Mobile app only — not available on Rocketmoney.com. Premium-only.

Source: Rocket Money Help Center — verified May 2026

What's in this guide

Tags vs categories — what the difference is

This is the conceptual point that trips up most users at first.

Categories are mutually exclusive. Every transaction has exactly one category. Categories drive your budget — your Restaurants budget is the sum of all Restaurants-categorized transactions in a month.

Tags are additive labels. A transaction can have any number of tags (or none). Tags don't drive budget calculations; they're a flexible reporting and grouping layer on top.

Per Rocket Money's Help Center: "Whether for home renovations, vacations, or work expenses, transaction tags help you track your spending in a way that's flexible, fast, and makes sense to you."

Concrete example. You take a 7-day vacation:

  • Day 1: $80 hotel, $40 dinner, $25 gas.
  • Day 2-7: Various restaurants, snacks, attractions, more gas.

Without tags, that spending is correctly distributed across Hotels, Restaurants, Gas, and Entertainment categories — useful for normal monthly budgeting, useless for seeing total trip cost. Tag every trip transaction "Summer Vacation 2026" and you can pull a single report of trip spending across all categories.

Categories are not replaced by this. The dinner is still in Restaurants. It's just also tagged Summer Vacation 2026.

How to create a tag (Premium, mobile-only)

Per Rocket Money's Help Center: "Creating tags for transactions is currently available to Premium members" and "Creating and adding a transaction tag is available exclusively on our mobile app — this feature is not available to complete the above instructions on our website, Rocketmoney.com."

Mobile flow:

  1. Tap Settings (⚙️) in the upper-left corner.
  2. Select Categories, Tags & Rules.
  3. Tap Tags, then Add Custom Tag.
  4. Choose a name (the Help Center example uses "Summer Vacation 2026" or "Home Renovations").
  5. Pick a color.
  6. Tap Save.

The tag is now available for application to any transaction.

Naming guidance:

  • Be specific with year/instance. "Vacation" is too generic — if you take multiple trips, they'll all get bucketed together. "Summer Vacation 2026" is specific.
  • Use Title Case for consistency.
  • Keep names short but readable. "HomeReno" reads worse than "Home Reno" or "Home Renovation."
  • Don't make tags that duplicate categories. "Restaurants" as a tag is pointless — that's already a category.

How to apply a tag to a transaction

Per the Help Center, mobile flow:

  1. Tap the transaction you'd like to tag.
  2. On the transaction detail screen, tap Add tags.
  3. Either create a new tag inline or select from existing tags.
  4. Tap Apply to assign the tag to the transaction.

You can apply multiple tags to the same transaction. A business lunch on a trip might be tagged both "Client Lunches" and "Q3 Travel."

To remove a tag, repeat the flow and deselect.

How to review tagged spending

Per the Help Center: "Once you've added tags to your transactions, you can review them from the Spending tab."

The Spending tab surfaces your tagged transactions and lets you see totals by tag. This is where the value lands — pull up "Home Renovation" and see the running total across all the categories the spending touched.

A few practical notes on review:

  • Tagged spending counts in its categories normally. A $200 hotel charge tagged "Vacation" still hits your Hotels category. The tag adds visibility, not exclusion.
  • Tags work alongside ignore. If you want a transaction in a tag's totals but not in your monthly budget, ignore it from budgets and tag it. See How to Ignore Transactions in Rocket Money.
  • Review at the project level, not the daily level. Tags are most useful when you look at total spending across the project's lifetime, not a per-day breakdown.

Tag patterns that pay off

A few tag patterns that consistently provide value:

Vacation / trip tags. The classic use case. "Summer Vacation 2026" lets you total a multi-category trip. Set the tag at the start; tag each transaction during the trip.

Home renovation / project tags. "Kitchen Reno" or "Garage Build" — track the full cost of a multi-month project across Home, Hardware, Labor, and other categories.

Tax-relevant grouping (beyond Tax-Deductible category). "2026 Charitable Giving," "Q3 Business Mileage" — surface clusters for year-end review. The Tax-Deductible category exists for the broad strokes; tags handle finer-grained reporting.

Gift tracking. "Holiday Gifts 2025" — track total gift spending across Shopping, Restaurants (gift cards), Online (Amazon).

Health / medical events. "Surgery Expenses 2026" — bundle insurance copays, prescription costs, follow-up visits, and related travel for FSA/HSA reporting.

Wedding planning. "Wedding 2027" — months of distributed spending across many categories that you want to track in total.

Project-based work expenses. "Client X Project" — track project costs you're going to invoice or expense.

Side hustle expenses. "Etsy Shop 2026 Costs" — group expenses tied to a specific income stream for net-income calculations.

Dependents. "Kid 1 Expenses" / "Kid 2 Expenses" — track per-child expenses across categories. Useful for divorce/custody arrangements where one parent reports certain expenses.

Pet-specific events. "Buddy Vet Bills 2026" — track total vet/medical/medication for a specific pet.

A reasonable target: 3-8 active tags at any given time. More than that often means you're over-tagging.

Tags pair perfectly with rules. Premium gets you both. Set up Transaction Rules to auto-tag matching transactions (a rule could auto-tag any payment to your contractor with "Kitchen Reno"). Setup once, applies forever.

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How this compares to YNAB and Monarch

Tags are one of the more meaningful differentiators across budgeting apps:

Rocket Money. Premium-only. Mobile-only creation. Color-coded labels, multiple per transaction. Solid for project tracking; less powerful for advanced reporting.

YNAB. Memos and Flags rather than tags. Memos are free-text notes; Flags are colored markers. Different mental model — YNAB users typically use specific categories instead of tags for project tracking. Workable but less flexible than dedicated tags.

Empower. Limited tagging. Investment-account focus means transaction-level tagging is secondary.

Monarch. Strongest tag system of the four. Tags are first-class, available on web and mobile, support multi-tag combinations, and have rich reporting (totals by tag, by category-within-tag, etc.). If multi-dimensional spending analysis is your priority, Monarch is the upgrade.

For users with periodic projects and trips, Rocket Money's tags are sufficient. For users who want detailed multi-dimensional reporting (per-tag breakdowns by category, time, account), Monarch is more powerful.

Try Rocket Money Free tier identifies recurring charges, helps you spot subscriptions to cancel, and includes bill negotiation (available to all users — Rocket Money charges a 35-60% success fee on first-year savings only when negotiation succeeds). Premium ($7-$14/month sliding scale) adds Smart Savings, Concierge cancellation help, real-time sync, and detailed credit-score reporting. Try Rocket Money →

FAQ

Why don't I see the Tags option in Settings? You're on the free tier. Tags are Premium-only.

Can I create tags on the desktop website? No. Per the Help Center, tag creation is mobile-only.

Can I bulk-apply a tag to many transactions at once? Not directly — tagging is per-transaction. To bulk-tag, use Transaction Rules to auto-tag matching transactions. See How to Create Transaction Rules in Rocket Money.

Will my tags survive if I unlink the bank? Per the unlink documentation, all transaction edits (including tags) on transactions tied to that bank are deleted when you unlink. See How to Disconnect a Bank Account or Credit Card From Rocket Money.

Can I rename a tag? The Help Center documentation doesn't explicitly mention renaming. The simplest workaround: create a new tag, re-apply to the transactions, delete the old tag.

Can I share tags with a partner via Account Sharing? Tags are per-account. Account Sharing surfaces transactions across users but tags don't sync across separate accounts.

Will tags appear in exports? Generally yes — tags are metadata that travels with transactions. See How to Export Transactions From Rocket Money for the export workflow specifics.

What's the difference between a tag and a custom category? A category is mutually exclusive (one per transaction). A tag is additive (many per transaction). Categories drive budget math; tags don't.

Related reading:

Not financial, legal, or tax advice. We earn a commission if you sign up for Rocket Money through a link on this page; the price is the same. Every claim is verified against Rocket Money's official Help Center documentation and the December 12, 2025 Content Affiliate Talking Points where applicable.