The average UK household now spends £119 per week on food shopping in 2026.
That’s £6,188 a year, up 23% on 2024.
For a single person, expect to spend around £55 per week (groceries plus food out).
Couples land at roughly £100.
Families with one child average £138 a week. Two children pushes you to £161, and three or more sits around £170.
If you’re well above those numbers, you’re overspending.
If you’re well below, you might be cutting too close to the bone.
Here’s the full breakdown by household size, what’s actually driving the cost, and what to do if your shop has crept up.
Table of Contents
How much does the average person spend a week on a food shop?
Food costs in the UK have settled into a new, higher normal.
The big inflation surge of 2022/23 is behind us, but the prices that surge created have largely stuck.
The average household food bill is now £6,188 a year, which is £1,144 more than in 2024 according to Confused.com’s March 2026 research.
That’s the average.
What you actually spend depends on three things: how many people you feed, where you shop, and how much of your eating happens outside the house.
Let’s break it down.
Key stats for 2026:
- The average UK household spends £119 per week on food shopping (Confused.com, March 2026)
- That’s £6,188 a year, a 23% increase since 2024
- Per person, that works out to around £40-£55 per week including food out
- Meat is the single most expensive category at around £16 per week
- Households with children spend 16-43% more than households without
Weekly food spend for one person
| Time period | Groceries | Food out | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly | £41 | £14 | £55 |
| Bi-weekly | £82 | £28 | £110 |
| Monthly | £178 | £61 | £239 |
| Quarterly | £533 | £182 | £715 |
| Yearly | £2,132 | £728 | £2,860 |
Source: ONS Family Spending data (2025/26) and Confused.com (March 2026). Figures rounded.
Looking at the data, the average UK salary is around £39,039 a year, which works out to roughly £2,636 a month after income tax and National Insurance.
Set that against a single person’s total monthly food spend of around £239 (£178 on groceries plus £61 on food out) and you’re looking at 9.4% of monthly take-home pay going on food.
That percentage drops slightly when you scale to households, because food costs don’t rise proportionally with the number of people.
A two-adult household sharing meals and bulk-buying eats more efficiently per person than a single household.
Add children and the percentage climbs again, both because kids eat more than people expect and because convenience food creeps up when you’re feeding a family on a schedule.
The current average UK household size is 2.36 people (ONS, 2024).
I’ve broken the figures down by household size below, from a single person up to a family of five, so you can find the row that actually matches your situation.
Weekly food spend by household size (2026)
| Household | Weekly food shop | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | £55 | £2,860 |
| 2 adults | £100 | £5,200 |
| 2 adults + 1 child | £138 | £7,176 |
| 2 adults + 2 children | £161 | £8,372 |
| 2 adults + 3+ children | £170+ | £8,840+ |
Includes groceries plus food eaten out of the home. Source: Confused.com 2026 research, ONS Family Spending data.
How does income affect what we eat?
Income is the single biggest predictor of what ends up in someone’s trolley.
Higher-income UK households tend to buy more fresh fruit and vegetables, more organic produce, more fresh fish and quality meat, and more variety overall.
Lower-income households lean harder on frozen items, pre-made meals, processed meat, and value ranges.
The gap isn’t about taste or willingness, it’s about cost per calorie.
Fresh and organic carries a price premium of 20-50% over the equivalent supermarket basics, and when budgets are tight, that premium gets cut first.
The 2026 numbers: the median UK salary is around £39,039 a year (ONS, 2025). London median sits closer to £44,000.
Outside London, the gap between earning the median and earning 25% above it is the gap between cooking from raw ingredients most nights and reaching for the convenience aisle.
If you’ve got dependants, the rough rule is to aim for around 1.5-2x the median to maintain the same food quality you’d manage as a single person on the median.
That’s not a comfortable number for most UK households right now, which is why the cost-saving tactics in the next section matter more than they did five years ago.
How is the cost of living crisis affecting the cost of food?
The cost of food has stabilised compared to the 2022/23 spike, but it hasn’t come back down.
A few things are keeping prices high in 2026:
- Wages are rising slower than supermarket prices.
- Real wages have grown about 2% since 2024, but food prices have grown 23%. The squeeze is uneven.
- Brexit-related supply costs are now baked in. Border checks, customs paperwork, and labour shortages in agriculture and logistics added a structural cost layer that hasn’t unwound.
- Energy and shipping volatility. Even when energy bills are stable, the food supply chain is sensitive to spikes, and 2025 saw two of those.
- Discounter market share has plateaued. Aldi and Lidl gained ground rapidly through 2022-24 but have stopped taking share from Tesco/Sainsbury’s, which has reduced the downward pricing pressure on the big four.
If you’ve felt your shop creep up over the last year without obviously changing what you buy, you’re not imagining it.
The category-level rises are still there, just less dramatic than the headlines were in 2023.
How can I reduce my food costs?
Buying as you go and shopping in Sainsbury’s Local or Tesco Express is one of the fastest ways to increase the price of a weekly food shop.
Equally full shops in places like Waitrose and Marks and Spencer will soon add up.
We all know Aldi and Lidl are cheaper options, and in fact, the quality of the products on everyday items like fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and meat is pretty decent.
According to a recent study by Which, Aldi is shown as 15% cheaper than Waitrose and 10% cheaper than Asda on everyday household items.
Here are some tips for reducing your food bills:
The big one is to use a cashback app that combines budgeting and rewards.
Most cashback apps just give you money back. Gains App does that and tracks your food spend in the same place, so you can see whether your shop is actually creeping up over time. See my full cashback apps guide for the full lineup.
Some other ways to save include:
- Meal plan in advance
- Batch cook or use meal boxes
- Supermarket loyalty schemes
- Avoid pre-prepared veg and fruit
- Freeze items that may go out of date
- Host meat-free Mondays
- Make packed lunches for work
- Look for the supermarkets’ own brands
- Cut back on wastage
- Reduce consumption of alcoholic drinks
What is the average cost of eating out vs eating in?
The average meal cost in the UK for food and drink at a local restaurant is £12-20 for one person, increasing to £15-25 per person in London.
If you’re going somewhere fancier, this can increase up to £50 per person.
This is in stark contrast to eating in, with the average meal costing somewhere between £3-7 per person, depending on what you eat.
Equally the cost of food in London will be higher than most other places in the UK.
How does my food shop compare to average?
Knowing the average is one thing.
Knowing what *you* spend is another, and most people are surprised when they actually look.
The fastest way to find out is to add up your last three months of grocery transactions and divide by 13 (weeks).
If you do this manually you’re looking at a 15-30 minute job.
If you use a budgeting app that connects to your bank, it’s a 30-second job.
I built Gains App partly because I got fed up trying to track my own food spend across multiple cards and accounts.
It connects to your bank through secure Open Banking, categorises your spending automatically, and tells you what your actual weekly food shop is.
You can ask it things like “how much did I spend on Tesco last month?” and get an answer in seconds.
If you’ve never actually checked, you’re guessing. Stop guessing.
How much should I spend on my grocery shop?
If you factor in the numbers, people who earn £60k or more spend up to 30% more a month on food.
This is down to eating out in restaurants and grabbing quick-serve lunches during the working day instead of taking in packed lunches.
Looking at the data above, spending between 9-11% of your wage on your monthly food shop is what you should aim for.
There will obviously be fluctuations depending on the time of year, as we all know that we eat much more during Christmas.
Now, these figures above do not include things like pet food which would be an added expense. For example, I feed my dog raw food and this cost adds up to another £40 a month.
How can budgeting help your money go further?
A budget sounds boring, but the people who consistently spend less on food than average have one thing in common: they know what they’re spending.
Not roughly. Actually.
You’ve got two ways to do this:
Manual tracking.
Spreadsheet, pen and paper, whatever works. Log every shop, every meal out, every coffee. Total it weekly. The grind is the point: it forces you to confront the number.
App-based tracking.
A budgeting app connects to your bank, categorises your spending, and shows you the food category as a single number you can watch week by week. Less friction, but you have to actually open the app.
Both work. The best one is the one you’ll stick with. If you’ve tried spreadsheets and abandoned them after three weeks, try the app route.
If apps make you feel surveilled, stick with the spreadsheet.
For app users, Gains App is what I built because nothing else combined budgeting with cashback in one place.
Most budgeting apps tell you you’re overspending and leave it there.
Most cashback apps give you money back but don’t help you see the bigger picture. Gains does both.
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Thoughts
The honest answer to “how much should I spend on a food shop” is: it depends on your household, your habits, and where you shop.
The £119 a week UK average is a useful anchor, but your number is your number.
Three things to take away:
1. The average has gone up 23% since 2024. If your shop has crept up too, that’s why.
2. Discount supermarkets, meal planning, and cashback apps are the three biggest levers. Pulling all three is worth £40-80 a week for most households.
3. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Track your actual food spend for a month before you decide whether you’ve got a problem.
If you’d rather not do that with a spreadsheet, Gains App does it automatically and adds cashback into the same place.
Either way, get a real number, then act on it.
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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.
