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What should groceries cost?
There is no correct number, but there is a normal range, and most people have never seen theirs.
This gives you something to check your own spending against.
A starting point for comparison
$181
a week, estimated
Or about $784 a month.
Allowing for the usual variation, somewhere between $154 and $208.
Read this before you use the number
Where you live moves this more than anything else on the page. It is a starting point for comparison, not a target: compare it with what your household needs and can afford.
Where this number comes from
This is an SCI estimate at 2026 US prices, in the region of the USDA food plan levels but not taken from a published table. It is not a survey of households.
- A week per adult: thrifty $65, moderate $85, comfortable $110.
- Each child counts as 75 percent of an adult, averaged across ages 0 to 17.
- Cost per head falls as the household grows, because bigger households buy in bigger units: 1.2x for one person down to 0.95x for five or more.
- Each meal out a week takes off 1.5 percent, capped at 20 percent, because the kitchen still has to be stocked.
- The range is 15 percent either side, and the result is rounded to whole dollars.
Local prices move this more than any of it. Your household needs may differ.
How to use the number without it becoming a stick
If you are already under it, you are doing better than most and you can stop worrying about the grocery bill.
If you are over it, that is information rather than a verdict. Where you live moves this figure by more than any shopping habit does, and a household in a high cost city can be well over the average while shopping carefully.
The useful comparison is not against this number. It is against your own spending last month, and the month before that.
Find out where it actually goes
A target is only half of it. The other half is seeing which part of the bill is not turning into meals.
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