How much should you spend on groceries? Use your own receipts
· 4 min read
Search "how much should I spend on groceries" and you'll get averages for a household that isn't yours: different size, different city, different diet. A more useful number is the one you already spend, worked out properly from four weeks of your own receipts, with the things that aren't food taken out.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Here's the whole method, with the arithmetic.
Averages are a sanity check, not a target
Grocery spending depends on how many people you're feeding, how old they are, where you live, what you eat and how often you eat out. An average blends all of that away.
Published figures are still useful for one thing: telling you whether your number is in a sensible range. In the US, the Department of Agriculture publishes the monthly cost of four food plans, from thrifty to liberal, broken down by age. In Canada, several provinces publish the cost of a Nutritious Food Basket. Look yours up after you've done the steps below, not before.
Step 1: Keep four weeks of food receipts
All of them: the supermarket, the corner store, the warehouse club, the online grocery order. Four weeks is long enough to include a big stock-up shop and a quiet week, so neither one skews the number.
Don't change how you shop while you're doing this. You're measuring, not dieting.
Step 2: Take out what isn't food
This is the step most people skip. It's why their "grocery" number is wrong.
A supermarket receipt is rarely all groceries. Here's an example receipt:
| What was on it | Amount |
|---|---|
| Food | $131.65 |
| Paper towels, detergent, dish soap | $38.20 |
| Shampoo and painkillers | $17.55 |
| Receipt total | $187.40 |
If you count the whole $187.40 as groceries, your grocery number is $55.75 too high on this one receipt, about 30%. Do that every week and you'll set a food budget you can't hit, because it was never all food.
For tax: in many places food and household items are taxed differently, and the rules depend on where you live. Unless you need precision, leave the tax with the non-food lines. That's usually where most of it applies.
Step 3: Add it up, and convert it properly
Say your four weeks of food came to:
| Week | Food only |
|---|---|
| 1 | $142.30 |
| 2 | $96.85 |
| 3 | $171.40 |
| 4 | $118.25 |
| Total | $528.80 |
That's an average of $132.20 a week ($528.80 ÷ 4).
Now the common mistake: multiplying by four to get a month. A month is about 4.33 weeks, not 4 (52 weeks ÷ 12 months). So:
- $132.20 × 52 = $6,874.40 a year
- $6,874.40 ÷ 12 = $572.87 a month
Multiplying by four would have given $528.80, which is $44.07 a month short. That's how a budget that "should" work comes up short every month.
If there are three of you, that's about $190.96 per person per month ($572.87 ÷ 3). Now's the time to compare with the published figures from earlier.
Step 4: Decide what counts as groceries, once
The edges are where budgets get argued about. Decide once, write it down, and stick to it:
| Item | Groceries? | A common choice |
|---|---|---|
| Snacks from a gas station | your call | groceries if it's food you'd otherwise buy at the store |
| Coffee beans | yes | groceries; café coffee goes elsewhere |
| Alcohol | your call | its own line, if you want to see it |
| Pet food | no | pets |
| Toilet paper and cleaning supplies | no | household |
| Takeout | no | eating out |
There's no right answer. What matters is that next month's number is counted the same way as this month's.
Step 5: Set a target you can actually find
"Spend less on groceries" isn't a target. Take your real number, choose a cut, and find it in the line items before you commit to it.
Using the example: a 10% cut on $572.87 is $57.29 a month, or about $13.22 a week ($57.29 × 12 ÷ 52).
Now look at the receipts for something that size. Say a pre-made salad at $6.99 appears three times a week. That's $20.97 a week on one item. Making two of those three at home could cover most of the cut by itself.
That's the point of doing this from receipts instead of statements. A bank statement tells you that you spent $572 at food stores. Only the receipts tell you that $21 a week of it was salad.
Doing this without a calculator
Step 2 is the tedious one. Splitting every receipt into food and not-food by hand takes an evening.
Xpento does that split as it reads the receipt. Each line is filed under its own category, so the milk goes under Groceries, the shampoo under Hair & Cosmetics and the cat food under Pet Care. Your Groceries total is food only, without you separating anything. You can then set a monthly budget for Groceries, and each item counts toward its own category. Four weeks of grocery receipts fits well inside the free plan's 50 receipts a month.
Start tonight
Pick a place for receipts: an envelope, a photo album or an app. Put every food receipt from the next four weeks in it. On day 29, do steps 2 and 3 once. You'll have a grocery number that's actually yours.