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What a home-cooked portion actually costs

Not under a dollar, the way the savings lists count it, and not twelve, the way it feels. Work it out with your own prices.

by · Published · 4 min read

Savings lists like to cost a meal from the sale price of the ingredients and arrive at something under a dollar. That is true for exactly the week the lentils were on offer. An honest figure is higher, and it is still low enough to be worth knowing - which is the point of writing it down rather than guessing at it.

A realistic starting figure

Start at $4.50 a portion for a meal that fills you up and is not pasta with ketchup. At one main meal a day that is $1,644 a year of eating at home. That is the number the takeaway, the meal kit and the restaurant have to be compared against - and it is a starting figure to replace with yours, not a finding.

There is a national figure to sanity-check your own total against. The Consumer Expenditure Survey puts average spending on food at home at $6,224 per consumer unit in 2024, against $3,945 for food away from home[1]. That is a household rather than a person, so it is not directly your per-portion cost; it is a ceiling to notice if your own arithmetic lands somewhere very different.

The line almost everybody leaves out

Waste. In a lot of households a noticeable share of what was bought goes in the bin - not through carelessness, but because package sizes and recipe quantities do not match. A bunch of herbs for one tablespoon, a bag of salad for two portions. If you want to lower the real cost of cooking, that is usually a bigger lever than switching brands, and it does not require cooking anything different. It requires buying in the quantities you actually use, which is the part that is genuinely inconvenient.

Two smaller ones, named so the figure above is not quietly too low: the energy to cook it, and the trip to buy it. Neither is large per portion and neither is zero. If you want the strict version, add them; if you want the useful version, know that they are the reason $4.50 is nearer the truth than the sub-dollar figure in the listicle.

Work out your own portion

This calculation runs on our server and is not stored – neither your result nor your entry.

per week

$32

per month

$137

per year

$1,644

Once $4.50
Times per year (daily) 365.25
Per year $1,644
Invested as a monthly amount $137
After the period, nominal $111,682
Of that, in today’s purchasing power $61,656

Assumptions behind this calculation

  • Assumed return per year: 5.0%
  • Assumed inflation per year: 2.0%
  • Period considered: 30
  • Calculated as if the annual amount were invested in twelve monthly instalments.

Take one meal you actually cook, add up what went into it from a receipt rather than from memory, and divide by the number of portions it produced - including the one you ate the next day. That single number is worth more than any average, including ours, because it is the one that applies to your shopping and your household.

What you can do about it

  1. Cost one real meal from a real receipt

    Not a recipe, a receipt. Take the last thing you cooked, price the ingredients from what you actually paid, and divide by portions produced. Ten minutes, once. From then on every comparison with a takeaway is arithmetic instead of a feeling.

  2. Buy in the quantities you use, not the quantities on offer

    The three-for-two on fresh produce is only a saving if the third one gets eaten. Where it does not, the discount is a surcharge with a friendly label. This is the single change that moves the real per-portion cost most, and it saves effort as well as money.

  3. Cook the portion count, not the recipe

    Most of the cost of cooking is the standing there, and it barely rises with quantity. Deciding in advance how many portions a session produces - and having somewhere to put them - converts one evening's work into three meals, which changes the per-portion figure far more than ingredient substitutions do.

Frequently asked

Where does the $4.50 come from?

It is a starting figure, chosen to be realistic rather than flattering, and the article says so. There is no official per-portion cost to cite: the national statistics measure household spending on food, not the cost of a plate. That is exactly why the calculator asks for your figure - and why the honest thing is to label ours as an estimate instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

Does this include the time spent cooking?

No, and that is deliberate. Putting an hourly rate on cooking would make almost every home-cooked meal look like a loss, which is both technically defensible and useless - people do not treat dinner as billable work. Where an hourly rate genuinely does decide something, we use one and say so: that is what the switching calculator is for.

Is cooking at home always cheaper?

Per portion, in almost every comparison, yes - but not always by enough to matter for a single meal, and not at all if the food goes off before it is eaten. The comparison that actually decides anything is your per-portion cost against what you would otherwise have paid, and that is a calculation with two numbers in it, both of which are yours.

Sources

  1. Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024: average annual spending per consumer unit of $6,224 on food at home and $3,945 on food away from home (series CXUFOODHOMELB0101M and CXUFOODAWAYLB0101M, retrieved through the BLS public data API; the two sum exactly to the published food total of $10,169), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved August 27, 2026.

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