How Our Grocery Bill Compares to the Average Family in America

I have a simple goal with today’s blog post: to understand how our family’s grocery spending stacks up with the average family in America.

From there, I hope to make improvements to lower that number (hopefully without significant tradeoffs) and report back to you in a few months with the results.

But first, I need to figure out what the average family spends on groceries.

You would think this is a fairly easy thing to figure out, but even when chatting among our friends, I find it’s not so simple.

For one, many people don’t know what they spend. They simply aren’t tracking it, or not tracking it very well.

I’m not sure we have a complete grasp on it, to be honest.

And the reason for that has to do with a small complication: sometimes other expenses get mixed in with our grocery spending— we might pick up things like detergents and other disposables.

Do those count or not?

Let’s dive into the best data we have available and see if that clears up the waters.

A quick look at the data on grocery spending:

Source #1: This long reddit thread with hundreds of replies: “How much are your average grocery bills per month?”

Using chatgpt to help me analyze the comments (which are about a year old), this is the rough pattern you’ll see in the responses:

Singles: $150–300/month
Couples: $400–800+/month
Family of Three: $800–1,000/month
Family of Four: $1,000–1,300+/month
Families of 5–6: $1,000–1,600+/month

That averages out to about $225-300/month per person, with larger families being towards the lower end thanks to some minor economies of scale.

Source #2: 2024 Census Bureau findings, nicely visualized by state in this image.

The range in the mainland US goes from about $221 in Wisconsin to $298 in California. Again, that’s monthly grocery spending per month.

It’s promising to see our data line up here as both sources so far are telling us the same story.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, the average spend per month comes in at roughly $250/person.

Let’s check one more data source to confirm our numbers.

Source #3: 2025 USDA data courtesy of this Dave Ramsey blog post.

In the article, they have a handy little graphic that breaks down spend across two-dimensions: family size & quartiles of spending.

Those quartiles are labeled thrifty, low-cost, moderate, and liberal. 

Given the goal of my investigation, I’m just going to look at families, and try to estimate the per person spend. 

Keep in mind that if you’re only shopping for a couple, the per person cost will be about 14-19% higher.

But for families, those in the “thrifty” category can expect to spend about $250/person, $270 for “low cost” and $330 for “moderate spenders”.

That range of $250-330 is within striking distance of our other data sources.

So, how much should I be spending on groceries each month?

Since we’re trying to live frugally, and have a larger family of six, I’m going to aim for the lower end of the ranges we’ve been seeing in the data.

If I take all three data sources, and make an average of the bottom quartile spending I arrive at $225-250/person per month.

So the most frugal families are spending about $225/person each month on groceries— which seems pretty good to me.

I couldn’t get a straight answer about whether these numbers include other incidental purchases you might make at a grocery store.

For the reddit numbers, it probably does. For the Census Bureau, my research suggests it does as well. And for USDA, it’s likely they do not. In all cases, restaurant spending is a separate category.

Since we only pick up a few non-food items at the grocery store, and get the vast majority on Amazon, I’m going to just call it a wash.

This isn’t a rigorous study, after all. Just a quick look into if we’re in the right ballpark.

So, the real question: how much are we currently spending on groceries?

Looking at my wife’s tracker for the past 3 months, and making a few minor adjustments— it looks like we spent $3,927 or $1,309 a month.

Now, we’re a family of 6, but one of our kids is just about to turn three. Do I still count them as a full person since they’re not eating nearly as much as the older kids?

If you use 6 people in our family that comes out to $218/month. And if you’re weird and use 5.5 people to slightly adjust for the age, that brings us to $238/month.

It looks like we spend about $218-238/month on groceries per family member— which, according to our data, is not bad at all. 

Especially when the average family is closer to $270.

Right where you’d expect a large frugal family to come in at.

But you know what? I think we can do even better.

I’m not sure we need to spend less, but it might be fun for a month or two to see how low we can reasonably go.

I’ll work on that experiment next and report back to you soon with the results. 

Stay tuned!