How much should you actually spend on groceries? A real household budget breakdown

"How much should groceries cost?" has no single right answer — but it does have a defensible range, once you break it down by household size and what you're actually optimising for.

Start from a per-person baseline, not a household total

Per-person weekly grocery spend is more useful than a household figure, because it scales. A reasonable starting baseline for an adult eating mostly home-cooked meals:

• £35–45 / week — lean, workhorse-meal-heavy, little waste
• £45–60 / week — comfortable, some variety, occasional treats
• £60+ / week — minimal budget pressure, more convenience items

Children typically run 60–70% of an adult's figure, since portions are smaller and snacks make up more of the total. A family of four (two adults, two children) lands around £140–190/week at the lean-to-comfortable end — which is why a lot of published "family of four" budgets cluster around £150–180.

The taper effect: bigger households don't scale linearly

A household of four doesn't cost twice what a household of two does. Staples get bought in larger, more efficient quantities, and batch cooking spreads fixed costs (a jar of spice, a bag of rice) across more servings. Budgeting a flat per-person rate without adjusting for this is the single most common way a "sensible" grocery budget overshoots — four people eating leftovers from one big pot costs noticeably less per head than the same four cooking individual portions.

What actually moves the number

Three factors swing a realistic budget more than anything else:

1. Meat as the centrepiece vs. meat as a flavouring. A dinner built around a whole piece of meat per person costs multiples of one where meat seasons a grain- or legume-based dish.
2. How much gets thrown away. Food waste isn't a rounding error — a genuinely common estimate is that a fifth of what's bought in a typical household is never eaten. Planning portions against what you'll actually use closes most of that gap on its own.
3. Convenience premium. Pre-chopped, pre-marinated, single-portion packaging routinely costs 30–50% more per unit than the same ingredient bought whole.

Setting your own number

Pick a figure from the ranges above, then treat it as a ceiling you plan underneath, not a target you aim for. A plan that consistently lands 10–15% under budget gives you headroom for the inevitable week something's more expensive than usual, without the whole month slipping.

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This is exactly the number Mealconomy asks for first — your weekly figure, not a recipe you liked the look of — and builds the week, and the shopping list, to fit under it.