"How much should I spend on groceries?" has two honest answers. One is a benchmark: what it typically costs to feed a household like yours. The other is your own number, built from what you actually buy. You need both. The benchmark tells you whether you're way off; your own number gives you a budget you can actually keep.
Averages by household
The most useful public benchmark in the US is the USDA food plans. The USDA publishes estimates of what it costs to eat at home at four levels: Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost and Liberal. The figures are broken down by age and sex, so you can add up a cost for your specific household (two adults and a six-year-old, say) instead of relying on a generic "family of three." The tables are updated regularly as food prices move.
A few things to know before you compare yourself:
- They cover food at home only. Restaurants, takeout and delivery aren't included. Neither are paper towels, detergent, shampoo or pet food, even though those end up on your grocery receipt.
- They assume a fair amount of cooking from scratch, especially at the Thrifty level. If your cart leans on convenience foods, you'll land higher.
- Household size changes the math. The USDA suggests adjustments for households larger or smaller than four people, because a single person usually pays more per person than a family buying bigger packages.
- The plans are national. Food costs more in some regions than in others.
We're deliberately not quoting dollar amounts here. They change as prices move, and a number copied into a blog post goes stale fast. Search for the current USDA food plans table, find the rows for each person in your household, add them up for each of the four levels, and see where you fall.
If you land somewhere between Thrifty and Moderate-Cost, you're inside the range the plans describe. If you're well above Liberal, there's probably room to trim, or a lot of non-food items riding along in your cart. Either way, the benchmark is a sanity check, not a target. Your target comes from your receipts.
Build your budget from receipts
A budget built from receipts works because it starts from what you actually buy, not from what you wish you bought. Here's how:
- Gather two full months of grocery receipts. One month can be skewed by a holiday or a big stock-up trip. Two months shows the pattern.
- Split out what isn't food. Household supplies, personal care, pet food, alcohol. They're real spending, but they belong on their own lines so you can see them.
- Take the average. That's your baseline.
- Set the budget a little below the baseline, not far below. A budget you blow in week two only teaches you to ignore budgets.
A worked example. A household of three pulls two months of receipts:
| Category | Month 1 | Month 2 | Average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food | $742 | $806 | $774 |
| Household and cleaning | $61 | $48 | $54.50 |
| Personal care | $38 | $52 | $45 |
| Pet food | $44 | $44 | $44 |
| Total at grocery stores | $885 | $950 | $917.50 |
The "grocery bill" looks like about $918 a month, but the food part is $774. That's the number to compare against the USDA plans, and the number to budget.
Set food at $740, a bit over 4% below the average, and give household, personal care and pet food their own lines at their averages. Now each line can be managed separately. If the household line jumps, that's a detergent-and-paper-towels problem, not a food problem, and the fix is different.
Then divide by weeks: $740 times 12, divided by 52, is about $171 a week. A weekly number is much easier to steer by than a monthly one. If you're at $120 by Wednesday, you know where you stand without doing math at the checkout.
To get all your receipts in one place first, see how to organize receipts.
Track prices over time
A budget that stays the same while prices climb quietly stops working. If your basket gets 5% more expensive over a year, a $740 budget buys what about $705 used to. You didn't overspend. The food got more expensive.
That's why it pays to track your own prices, not only your total. The official inflation figure is an average over a basket that isn't yours. If you buy a lot of coffee, eggs or beef, your personal rate can run well above or below the headline number.
Tratobor does this from your receipts. It tracks each line item over time and shows:
- Personal inflation: how much your own basket got more expensive, calculated from the items you actually buy. There's a separate explainer on your personal inflation rate.
- Where it's cheaper: the same item across the stores you shop at. If your milk is $3.89 at one store and $3.29 at another, you'll see it.
- What got pricier and what got cheaper, so you can swap before the budget breaks.
You add receipts by photo (it reads the line items, and you check them before saving), by PDF, or by importing a spreadsheet. It's free, with 15 receipt photos a month and analysis over the last three months.
When your personal inflation moves, adjust the budget on purpose. Raise it, or decide which items to swap to keep it flat. Both are fine. Pretending nothing changed isn't.
Cut 10% without pain
Ten percent of $740 is $74 a month, close to $900 a year. You can usually get there without eating worse by starting with the easy stuff:
- Store brands on five staples. Pick items you buy every week: pasta, canned goods, frozen vegetables, cheese, cereal. That alone often covers a big chunk of the target.
- Fewer top-up trips. Every extra stop is a chance for $15 of things you didn't plan to buy. Going from three quick runs a week to one can save more than coupons do.
- Use the unit price. The per-ounce or per-pound price on the shelf tag beats the package price for comparing.
- One "use it up" dinner a week. Cook from what's already in the fridge. Less waste means a lower bill.
- Right card for groceries. If you have a card with a higher grocery rate, use it, and check whether your store counts as a "grocery store" under its terms. The Cards page shows which of your cards would have earned more on your real spending.
Do two of these for a month, then check the next month's receipts and see how close you got. If you hit 10% easily, lower the budget a little more. If you missed, find the line that ran over before you decide the budget is wrong.
Our guide to saving money on groceries goes deeper on each of these tactics, with worked numbers.