The average UK household now says it spends £119 a week on its food shop, according to a 2026 poll by Confused.com. That’s more than £6,000 a year.
But that’s one household size, and a poll rather than receipts. If you live alone or as a couple, your number looks very different.
So we lined it up against the ONS‘s measured spending for every household type. Here’s what a food shop actually costs, and where yours should sit.
Key takeaways
- Average household: £119 a week, based on a February 2026 poll of 2,000 adults (Confused.com). Families report £138 with one child, £161 with two and £170 with three or more.
- One person: about £43 a week in today’s prices (£40.30 measured by the ONS), or roughly £185 a month.
- Two adults: about £77 a week in today’s prices (£73.20 measured), or £36.60 each.
- Where you shop matters most: the same 92-item basket cost £159.36 at Aldi and £223.75 at Waitrose in August 2026 (Which?).
- Nobody sticks to one supermarket: 89% of 4,569 Gains App users shopped at two or more chains in the last 90 days, 4.4 on average.
- Food inflation is down to 1.3%, its lowest annual rate since 2021, but prices aren’t falling. They’re rising more slowly.
Table of Contents
How much does one person spend on food a week?
A single working-age adult in the UK spends £40.30 a week on food and non-alcoholic drinks for the home, according to the ONS’s latest Family Spending survey.
That’s about £175 a month or £2,096 a year.
The survey covers April 2024 to March 2025, and food prices have risen about 5.6% since then. So in today’s prices, a typical solo shop is closer to £43 a week.
Single pensioners spend a little less: £38.90 a week for someone on the state pension.
You might also see £33.63 quoted. That’s DEFRA’s Family Food figure per person across all households, so it includes people in couples and families who share meals. It’s lower because shopping for more people is cheaper per head.
That’s measured spending from shopping diaries. Polls that ask people what they spend come out higher (see the family figures below), so treat it as the lower end of normal rather than a target.
If your solo shop is between £40 and £50 a week, you’re bang on average. Much above £60 and it’s worth a look at where you shop and how much you buy on the go.
Average weekly food shop by household size
Here’s what every household type spends each week, straight from the ONS Family Spending tables (FYE 2025).
We’ve added a monthly figure, an estimate in today’s prices, and the cost per person.
| Household | Per week | Per month | In today's prices* | Per person |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One adult | £40.30 | £175 | £43 | £40.30 |
| One adult (state pension) | £38.90 | £169 | £41 | £38.90 |
| Two adults | £73.20 | £317 | £77 | £36.60 |
| Two adults (state pension) | £73.50 | £318 | £78 | £36.75 |
| One adult, one child | £55.00 | £238 | £58 | £27.50 |
| One adult, two or more children | £69.40 | £301 | £73 | £20.41 |
| Two adults, one child | £81.60 | £354 | £86 | £27.20 |
| Two adults, two children | £98.30 | £426 | £104 | £24.57 |
| Two adults, three or more children | £119.60 | £518 | £126 | £22.15 |
| Three or more adults | £110.10 | £477 | £116 | £32.38 |
| Three or more adults with children | £125.60 | £544 | £133 | £26.17 |
Source: ONS Family Spending FYE 2025, Workbook 2, Table A23 (food and non-alcoholic drinks, UK). *Uprated by the CPI food index (+5.6% to August 2026), our estimate. Per person uses ONS’s average household size for each row. Excludes alcohol, eating out and takeaways.
Average food shop for two adults
Two adults spend £73.20 a week, or £317 a month. That works out at £36.60 each, around 9% less per head than living alone.
The saving comes from sharing: one pack of chicken, one bag of rice, less food going off in the fridge.
Average food shop for a family
A couple with one child spends £81.60 a week, rising to £98.30 with two children and £119.60 with three or more.
Single parents spend £55.00 with one child and £69.40 with two or more.
The per-person cost keeps falling as families grow, down to about £22 a head in a family of five or more. Bigger households buy bigger packs and waste less.
Families report spending more than that when they’re asked directly. Here’s the poll next to the measured figures:
| Household | What people say they spend (poll, Feb 2026) | Measured spending (ONS, today's prices) |
|---|---|---|
| Average household | £119 | £78 |
| Family with one child | £138 | £86 |
| Family with two children | £161 | £104 |
| Family with three or more children | £170 | £126 |
Sources: Confused.com / OnePoll, 2,000 UK adults, 30 January to 4 February 2026; ONS Family Spending FYE 2025 (average household, and two adults with one, two or three or more children), uprated to August 2026 prices. The poll’s family groups may include single parents.
Why does every source give a different average?
Every one of these figures is right. They’re just measuring different things.
| Figure | What it actually measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| £33.63 a week | Food and soft drinks for the home, per person, averaged across all households | DEFRA Family Food, FYE 2025 |
| £50.03 a week | All food and drink per person, including alcohol, eating out and takeaways | DEFRA Family Food, FYE 2025 |
| £73.70 a week | Food and soft drinks for the home, per household (2.3 people on average) | ONS Family Spending, FYE 2025 |
| £81.60 a week | The same measure for two adults and one child | ONS Family Spending, FYE 2025 |
| £119 a week | What 2,000 adults said they spend, for a household of two adults and one child | Confused.com poll, Feb 2026 |
The ONS and DEFRA figures come from the Living Costs and Food Survey, where around 5,000 households record every purchase in a two-week spending diary.
The £119 comes from an online poll of 2,000 adults in early 2026. It’s what people remember spending, not what they recorded, and Confused.com’s own breakdown counts household essentials like cleaning products as part of the shop.
The poll is closer to what many people feel at the till right now, because it catches top-up shops and household essentials. The ONS figures are the best like-for-like benchmark for your household type, because they’re recorded rather than remembered.
Our take: use both. If your weekly shop sits between the ONS figure and the poll figure for your household, you’re normal. Well above the poll, and it’s worth a look at where and how you shop.
How much should you spend on food a week?
There’s no single right number, but there is a useful sense check: the share of your spending that goes on food.
On average, UK households spend 10.9% of their total spending on food and soft drinks for the home, according to DEFRA. For the lowest-income fifth of households it’s 15.2%.
Take the average UK salary of £39,039. That’s roughly £2,636 a month after tax. A solo food shop of £175 a month is about 6.6% of that take-home, comfortably inside the average share.
If food is taking more than 15% of your take-home pay, that’s usually where the easiest savings are. Run your own numbers through our take-home pay calculator.
Is £50 a week enough for food? For one person, yes: it’s above the £40.30 average. For two adults it’s tight against the £73.20 average, but doable with a discount supermarket and meal planning.
Is £200 a week on food too much? It’s well above the measured figure for any household type. Even three or more adults living with children average £125.60. At £200, it’s likely that takeaways, alcohol or household non-food items are in the total.
What is the 5-4-3-2-1 grocery rule? It’s a shopping-list habit from social media, not an official guide: five fruit and veg, four proteins, three carbs, two sauces or spreads, and one treat. It works because it caps impulse buys.
What the same shop costs at each supermarket
Where you shop can move your bill more than almost anything else. Every month, Which? prices the same basket of everyday groceries at the big supermarkets.
Here’s August 2026, for 92 items:
| Supermarket | 92-item basket | vs Aldi |
|---|---|---|
| Aldi | £159.36 | cheapest |
| Lidl | £161.10 | +£1.74 |
| Asda | £185.21 | +£25.85 |
| Sainsbury's (with Nectar) | £185.55 | +£26.19 |
| Tesco (with Clubcard) | £189.45 | +£30.09 |
| Tesco | £192.97 | +£33.61 |
| Morrisons | £194.11 | +£34.75 |
| Sainsbury's | £195.33 | +£35.97 |
| Ocado | £207.62 | +£48.26 |
| Waitrose | £223.75 | +£64.39 |
Source: Which? supermarket price comparison, August 2026. The basket is Which?’s own mix of groceries and household items, not a typical weekly shop.
The same groceries cost 16% less at Aldi than at Tesco with a Clubcard, and 29% less than at Waitrose.
Loyalty cards help, but less than you might think. A Nectar card cut £9.78 off the Sainsbury’s basket and a Clubcard cut £3.52 off Tesco’s.
The switch maths (an illustration, not a promise): if a couple spending the £73.20 average did it all at Tesco prices and got the same 16% saving at Aldi, that’s about £11.60 a week, or roughly £600 a year. For someone living alone, it’s around £330 a year.
Your own saving depends on what you buy. Branded favourites and fresh fish don’t always swap cleanly. But for staples, the gap is real and it shows up every month.
Where Gains App users actually shop
The Which? basket tells you what the same shop costs. It doesn’t tell you where people actually shop, so we looked at our own data.
We run Gains App, and 4,569 of our users with a live bank connection bought groceries between 26 June and 23 September 2026. Here’s where they shopped.
| Supermarket | % of our grocery shoppers who used it | Share of supermarket transactions |
|---|---|---|
| Tesco | 81.1% | 28.0% |
| Sainsbury's | 63.8% | 15.7% |
| Co-op | 54.3% | 13.7% |
| Aldi | 47.4% | 10.4% |
| Asda | 46.1% | 8.2% |
| Morrisons | 45.3% | 9.1% |
| Lidl | 43.6% | 8.3% |
| Waitrose | 21.6% | 3.4% |
| Iceland | 14.4% | 1.2% |
| M&S Food | 12.4% | 0.9% |
| Farmfoods | 5.9% | 0.5% |
| Ocado | 4.2% | 0.6% |
Source: Gains App, 4,569 users with a live bank connection who bought groceries between 26 June and 23 September 2026 (172,814 grocery transactions). Supermarkets matched by merchant name, with store formats grouped under the parent brand (Tesco Express counts as Tesco). Transaction share is across these 12 chains only. 85.4% of users also bought from convenience stores, independents or bakeries. Data read as anonymised totals only.
Almost nobody is loyal to one supermarket. 89% of our users shopped at two or more chains, 80% used three or more, and the average was 4.4.
Tesco was used by 81% of shoppers and took 28% of transactions at the big chains.
The discounters are popular but mostly used alongside a main store. Aldi and Lidl were each used by more than four in ten shoppers, but together took under a fifth of transactions.
That matters for the switching maths below. Most people aren’t choosing between Aldi and Tesco. They’re already splitting the shop, and the real question is how much of it goes where.
The typical user spent £45.13 a week on groceries (median; the average was £62.90). That’s close to the ONS figure for one adult.
But a bank account can cover one person’s shop or a whole household’s, so treat it as a sense check rather than a benchmark.
A few caveats. The share counts transactions, not money, so a big Ocado order counts the same as a £3 top-up. That makes Ocado and Waitrose look smaller than their share of spend.
M&S Food is understated, because food bought in main M&S stores is usually categorised as shopping. And our users are cashback-minded, which probably explains the number of chains per person.
Switching supermarket vs earning cashback: which saves more?
If you’d rather not change where you shop, the other lever is money back on the shop you already do. We run Gains App, so here are its live supermarket rates, and an honest comparison with switching.
| Option | Two adults (£73.20 a week) | One adult (£40.30 a week) |
|---|---|---|
| Switch staples from Tesco to Aldi (16% cheaper basket) | about £600 a year | about £330 a year |
| Stay at Tesco, pay with a Gains gift card (3%) | about £114 a year | about £63 a year |
| Stay at Sainsbury's, pay with a Gains gift card (2.25%) | about £86 a year | about £47 a year |
| Stay at Asda or Morrisons, pay with a Gains gift card (2%) | about £76 a year | about £42 a year |
Sources: Gains App brand pages for Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons, checked 24 September 2026; Which? August 2026 basket; ONS weekly spend × 52. Rates change, so check the app before you shop.
On paper, switching wins by a distance. Aldi and Lidl aren’t on Gains, so if a discounter is a realistic option for you, that’s the bigger saving.
But not everyone can switch. If the nearest Aldi or Lidl is a long drive away, or you shop around work, childcare or a disability, the big supermarket down the road may be the only practical choice.
Travel costs eat into the saving too. HMRC’s advisory fuel rate for a mid-size petrol car is 17p a mile from September 2026. An extra 10-mile round trip every week costs about £88 a year in fuel alone, and an extra 20 miles costs about £177. For someone living alone, that can wipe out half of the switching saving or more.
Cashback is for the shop you’re going to do anyway: if Tesco is your nearest big store, 3% on a couple’s average shop is about £114 a year for the same trolley and no extra miles.
Average food shop by region
Where you live changes the answer too, although by less than you might expect.
| Region | Household food shop per week |
|---|---|
| Northern Ireland | £80.90 |
| South East | £74.40 |
| East of England | £74.20 |
| South West | £73.00 |
| East Midlands | £69.30 |
| UK average | £69.20 |
| London | £68.70 |
| North West | £66.40 |
| West Midlands | £66.40 |
| Wales | £66.10 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | £66.00 |
| Scotland | £64.80 |
| North East | £60.50 |
Source: ONS Family Spending, Workbook 3, Table A33. Three-year average, April 2022 to March 2025, food and non-alcoholic drinks per household. Regional figures are averaged over three years to give a big enough sample, so they run a little below the single-year UK figure of £73.70.
The surprise is London, below the UK average. Londoners spend more on eating out instead, and London households are a similar size to the rest of the UK. For the full picture of London prices, see our cost of living in London breakdown.
Are food prices still going up in 2026?
Yes, but slowly. Food and non-alcoholic drink prices rose 1.3% in the year to August 2026, the same as in July, according to the ONS.
That’s the lowest annual rate since September 2021, and a long way from the 19.1% peak in March 2023.
Lower inflation doesn’t mean cheaper food. It means prices are rising more slowly. The jumps from 2022 and 2023 are still in the price of every shop.
So if your shop costs more than it did two years ago without you buying more, you’re not imagining it.
Eating out: the part of the food bill people forget
DEFRA’s figures show the average person spends £12.69 a week on food and drink eaten out, including alcohol. That’s around a quarter of everything spent on food and drink.
Spending on food and soft drinks eaten out rose 13.8% in a year, far faster than the supermarket shop.
The ONS puts takeaways eaten at home at £4.70 a week per household, and restaurant and café meals at £17.80.
Our own Money Confidence survey of 1,679 UK adults found the same instinct: asked what they’d cut first if money got tight, 43% said eating out and only 19% said their food shopping.
So if your supermarket shop looks average but money still vanishes, check the meal deals, coffees and delivery apps. They rarely show up when you think about “the food shop”.
At home, DEFRA’s figure of £33.63 a week works out at about £1.60 per meal if you eat three meals a day. That’s the number to beat when a £4 meal deal looks tempting.
How to cut your weekly food shop
The biggest wins are boring ones. Here are the eight we’d start with, and our full food shopping savings guide on Gains goes deeper.
- Try a discounter for your staples. Even a partial switch to Aldi or Lidl captures part of that 16% gap.
- Use the loyalty price, not the shelf price. If you shop at Sainsbury’s or Tesco anyway, scan the card every time.
- Cut the top-up trips. Local and Express stores can charge more than the big store for the same products, and top-up trips are where impulse buys happen.
- Plan meals before you shop. A list built from a week of meals stops the “we’ve got nothing in” takeaway.
- Compare the unit price. Multibuys and “big” packs aren’t always cheaper per 100g. Watch for supermarket price tricks like reference pricing too.
- Trade down one brand level. Own-label basics on tins, pasta, rice and cleaning products are the easiest swaps.
- Freeze before it spoils. Bread, meat and leftovers freeze well, and waste is money in the bin.
- Earn money back on what you already buy. Our supermarket cashback guide shows how to stack cashback on a normal shop, and our money saving apps roundup covers the rest.
How to find out what you actually spend
Most people guess their food shop and guess low. The only way to know is to add it up.
The quick way: download three months of bank statements, add up every supermarket, takeaway and meal-out payment, and divide by 13 to get a weekly figure.
Then compare it to your row in the household table above. Our budgeting calculator will show you how it fits with everything else, and these household budget tips help if it doesn’t.
The automatic way: a budgeting app pulls in your spending by category, so your food spend is one number you can watch week to week. We built Gains App to do exactly that, alongside cashback on your shopping. See our budgeting apps comparison for the alternatives.
Either way, get a real number first. You can’t cut a food bill you haven’t measured.
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Thoughts
The average household says its food shop costs £119 a week. For one person the measured figure is about £43 a week, and for two adults about £77.
Find your household’s row, check what you actually spend, and if you’re well over it, start with where you shop. Just count the extra miles before you switch.
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Disclaimer: Content on this page is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making a financially related decision.
