What groceries cost per person

By The Pantry Pro team · 6 September 2026 · 8 min read

Two federal sources speak to what a week of groceries costs, and they answer different questions. USDA prices a week of food for one person at four cost levels: what a nutritionally adequate diet costs if you cook all of it at home. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports what households actually spent across a year, which divides down to a per-person week. Read alongside what prices have done since, the two bracket the number closely enough to tell whether your own bill is ordinary.

What USDA says a week of food should cost

USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion prices four market baskets — Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost and Liberal — and republishes the cost of each every month. These are normative figures. They cost out a diet that meets the Dietary Guidelines on the assumption that "all meals and snacks are prepared at home", not a record of what anyone bought.

In the January 2025 report the Thrifty plan came to $57.00 a week for a woman aged 20 to 50 and $71.40 for a man the same age. The other three plans use a 19 to 50 band and run higher: $61.20 and $70.40 on Low-Cost, $74.30 and $88.20 on Moderate-Cost, $94.90 and $107.30 on Liberal (USDA Food Plans, cost of food monthly reports).

Two details matter before you hold your own bill against those. The costs are given for people living in four-person households, and USDA suggests adjusting for other sizes: "1-person—add 20 percent; 2-person—add 10 percent; 3-person—add 5 percent". And the Thrifty plan is a policy number rather than advice — the reference family of four, at $229.20 a week, is what sets the maximum SNAP allotment. Every basket is updated monthly against the Consumer Price Index, and the weekly cost is the published figure; the monthly one is calculated "by multiplying the weekly costs by 4.333".

What an average household spends

The Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and its report on 2024 puts average annual spending on food at $10,169 — $6,224 on food at home and $3,945 on food away from home. Food was 12.9 percent of average annual expenditures that year, split 7.9 percent for groceries and 5.0 percent for restaurants and takeout (BLS, Consumer expenditures in 2024).

Those are per consumer unit, which BLS defines as "families, single persons living alone or sharing a household with others but who are financially independent, or two or more persons living together who share major expenses" (BLS glossary). The average consumer unit contained 2.4 people in 2024.

The per-person arithmetic

Dividing gives the per-person version of what households actually spent.

That division is rough, and worth being honest about. It divides one average by another, and the households behind it are of every size. It is not the cost of feeding one person living alone, and it is not a budget recommendation. It is a marker: if your groceries run $50 a week per person, you are spending about what the country spends.

That $50 sits below every adult figure in the USDA plans, Thrifty included, and the gap is not a sign that the country underfeeds itself. The two count different things. USDA's baskets assume every meal is cooked at home, while the $6,224 is grocery spending by households that also spent $3,945 eating out. And dividing by 2.4 people spreads that spending across children, whose plan costs run lower than an adult's.

The spread is much wider than the average

Averages hide the part that matters. USDA's Economic Research Service publishes food spending by income group. In 2024 the lowest income quintile spent $5,498 on food, which ERS gives as "33.0 percent of before-tax income". The middle quintile spent $9,097, or 12.2 percent of before-tax income. The highest spent $16,989, or 6.4 percent (USDA ERS, updated 1 June 2026).

In dollars the top group spends about three times the bottom group. As a share of income the bottom group spends about five times as much. Both facts are true of the same two households, which is why "the average American spends X" answers almost nothing on its own.

The same ERS page gives the national picture: "In 2025, U.S. consumers spent an average of 9.7 percent of disposable personal incomes on food, down from 10.4 percent in 1997." The at-home share was 4.8 percent and the away-from-home share 4.9 percent. Eating out now takes slightly more of disposable personal income than groceries do.

What prices have done since

The 2024 spending figures are two years old. The Consumer Price Index says how much of that gap is price.

In the 12 months ending July 2026, the food index "increased 3.0 percent over the last year". Food at home rose 2.7 percent and food away from home rose 3.4 percent. Over the month itself, food rose 0.1 percent while food at home "decreased 0.1 percent" (BLS CPI, released 12 August 2026).

Grocery inflation is not one number. Across the six major grocery store food groups over those 12 months:

Group 12-month change
Fruits and vegetables +5.1%
Nonalcoholic beverages +4.1%
Cereals and bakery products +2.7%
Other food at home +2.5%
Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs +1.9%
Dairy and related products −0.5%

That is 5.6 percentage points between the fastest group and the slowest, and dairy fell outright. A household that buys mostly produce and soft drinks saw a different year from one that buys mostly milk and chicken, and neither matches the headline.

Looking forward, ERS's outlook says "prices for all food are forecast to increase 3.0 percent" in 2026, with food-at-home prices up 2.5 percent and food-away-from-home prices up 3.6 percent. The published ranges are wide: 1.7 to 3.3 percent for groceries and 3.2 to 3.9 percent for restaurants (USDA ERS Food Price Outlook, updated 25 August 2026).

Using these numbers on your own bill

Split groceries from restaurants first

The survey keeps food at home and food away from home in separate lines, and the gap between them is large — $6,224 against $3,945 in 2024. A household comparing itself to the grocery figure while counting delivery orders in its own total will conclude it is overspending when it may not be.

Treat $6,224 as a floor, not a current figure

It is a 2024 average, and food-at-home prices have risen since. The 12 months to July 2026 alone added 2.7 percent, and 2024 is further back than that, so a 2026 equivalent is higher than $6,224 by more than 2.7 percent. The point of the number is the order of magnitude, not the last two digits.

Measure a month before changing anything

One month of grocery receipts, added up and divided by the people in the house, is a better number than any national average, because it is the only one that knows what you buy. Compare it against the $50 a week per person marker, and against whichever USDA plan matches how much of your food you cook at home. The size of the gap says which question to ask next: prices, quantity, or waste.

Separate what you control from what you do not

Nothing in a kitchen moves the price of eggs. What a household does control is how much of what it buys gets eaten. A 2.7 percent rise in grocery prices costs the average consumer unit about $168 a year on a $6,224 bill. One week of that household's groceries thrown away costs about $120. The two are the same order of magnitude, and only one of them answers to anything done at home.

The numbers in one place

USDA's January 2025 plans priced a week of home-cooked food for one adult under 50 at somewhere between $57.00 and $107.30, depending on the cost level. For 2024, the average U.S. consumer unit spent $6,224 on groceries and contained 2.4 people, which works out to roughly $50 a week each. Food took 12.9 percent of average annual household spending, and 9.7 percent of disposable personal income nationally in 2025. Grocery prices rose 2.7 percent in the year to July 2026, unevenly across aisles, and ERS expects about 2.5 percent for 2026 as a whole. Every one of those is an average with a household-sized range hidden inside it, so the figure worth trusting is still the one on your own receipts.

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