The paper investigates two issues regarding household expenditure on primary education of own children using the Second Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS2) data. Firstly, we look at factors which in ‡uence a household's decision to spend or not (the participation decision), and by how much (the expenditure decision). This is done for urban and rural households. We …nd that there are di¤erences in the factors which in ‡uence both decision levels for the two groups of households. Secondly, to get a deeper understanding of these rural-urban spending di¤erences, the study develops the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique for the independent Double Hurdle model. The proposed decomposition is done at the aggregate and disaggregated levels. The aggregated decomposition allows us to isolate the expenditure di¤erences into a part attributable to di¤erences in characteristics and a part which is due to di¤erences in coe¢ cients. The detailed (disaggregated) decomposition enables us to pinpoint the major factors behind the spending gap. At the aggregate decomposition level, our results show that at least 66% of the expenditure di¤erential is explained by di¤erences in characteristics between rural and urban households, implying that an equalization of household characteristics would lead to about 66% of the spending gap disappearing. At the disaggregated decomposition level, the rural-urban di¤erence in household income is found to be the largest contributor to the spending gap, followed by quality of access of primary schools. Besides, rural-urban di¤erences in mothers education and employment are found to contribute more to the spending di¤erential relative to the same for fathers.