money · 7 min read
How Much Should Groceries Cost a Family of Four? Check Yours Against the USDA's Four Food Plans
The USDA prices four grocery plans every month. See where your family's grocery spending lands and what moves the number.
By Porch Daily editors · Updated October 2026
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has priced out healthy home-cooked diets since 1894, and it still redoes the math every month. Its report for August 2026, issued in September, puts a family of four with two school-age kids at $1,023.70 a month on the leanest of its four food plans. On the most generous plan, the same family’s groceries come to $1,678.70.
You can find your own household’s spot on that scale with last month’s receipts and the report’s age table.
None of the four plans is a failing grade. Each one describes a family that eats well, and they differ in how much room the menu has.
Four plans, from $1,023.70 to $1,678.70
The report lists a weekly and a monthly cost for each person by age and sex, from a 1-year-old to adults over 71. For the Thrifty plan it also prints a total for the USDA’s reference family, a man and a woman under 51 with one child 6 to 8 and one child 9 to 11.
For the other three plans, you add up the same four people’s rows yourself.
| Plan | What it’s modeled on | Family of four, per month |
|---|---|---|
| Thrifty | A healthy diet on a tight budget, used to set SNAP benefits | $1,023.70 |
| Low-Cost | Households in the second-lowest quarter of food spending | $1,125.80 |
| Moderate-Cost | Households in the second-highest quarter of food spending | $1,388.20 |
| Liberal | Households in the top quarter of food spending | $1,678.70 |
From the USDA’s Cost of Food at Home report for August 2026, U.S. average. Every plan assumes all meals and snacks are made at home.
Each plan is a weekly basket of foods that meets federal dietary guidance, priced at average store prices and updated monthly with the Consumer Price Index.
The Thrifty plan also carries legal weight, since its June cost for the reference family sets the maximum SNAP benefit for the year that starts each October 1.
The Liberal plan has the oddest job. Its October cost for a man 19 to 50 is the figure the Department of Defense uses to update the Basic Allowance for Subsistence, the monthly food allowance it pays service members.
The Thrifty plan’s 2021 reset
On August 16, 2021, the USDA released a re-evaluation of the Thrifty plan that Congress had ordered in the 2018 Farm Bill. It found that a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet cost 21% more than the old plan did, the first change in the plan’s buying power since it was introduced in 1975.
The new basket added more fish and more red and orange vegetables, along with a small bump in calories. Its prices came from store sales data instead of what households reported paying. Average SNAP benefits rose by $36.24 per person per month starting October 1, 2021.
The other three plans haven’t had that review. Their cost levels were last set in 1983, and their baskets were rebuilt in 2007 from 2001-02 data. In August 2026 the Thrifty and Low-Cost plans sit just $102.10 apart for the reference family.
Congress has since limited the next review. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, bars a new Thrifty re-evaluation before October 1, 2027, and requires any future one to be cost-neutral.
Your family’s ages change the total
If your kids are small, you’re probably feeding them for less than you feed yourself. In the Thrifty plan, a child 6 to 8 runs $209.20 a month and a father under 51 runs $318.90.
Then come the teen years, when a boy 14 to 19 tops the whole Thrifty list at $326.20, more than his dad.
Keep the same two parents, swap the kids, and watch the Thrifty total move. With a 2-to-3-year-old and a 4-to-5-year-old it’s $933.50. With a teenage boy and a teenage girl it climbs to $1,158.80, which is $135.10 more than the reference family pays.
Household size moves it too. The report’s costs assume four people, and it suggests adding 20% if you live alone, 10% for two people and 5% for three, then subtracting 5% for five or six people and 10% for seven or more. If you’re a couple under 51, your two Thrifty rows add up to $572.60, and with 10% on top you’d land at $629.86.
Alaska and Hawaii pay more
The four-plan table is a national average for the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C. If you live in Alaska or Hawaii, you get your own Thrifty figures, built from food prices in Anchorage and Honolulu. For the reference family in August 2026, the Thrifty plan costs $1,294.70 a month in Anchorage and $1,556.00 in Hawaii.
Federal rules put rural Alaska higher still, with the Thrifty cost in the most remote areas running 56.42% above Anchorage’s.
On the mainland there’s one number for everyone. In a city where food costs more than average, your bill can come out a plan higher than your menu alone would put it.
Real families spend less at the store
The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks households what they spend in its Consumer Expenditure Survey. Its 2024 figures, released in December 2025, show four-person households spending $8,697 on food at home and $5,847 on food away from home. That works out to about $725 a month on groceries and $487 eating out, with roughly 60 cents of every food dollar going to the grocery store.
That $725 is lower than even the Thrifty plan’s $1,023.70.
Survey households also buy takeout and eat out, so their grocery line sits below a plan that assumes every meal is cooked at home. The survey figures are also in 2024 prices. If you buy lunch near work or order pizza on Fridays, you’ve moved part of your food budget off the grocery line too.
The plans assume you cook everything
The baskets list foods in the forms you’d buy them in and price them as if someone at home turns them into every meal. If you cook most meals from basic ingredients, your receipts will come close to the plan that fits your menu. Pre-cut, ready-made and single-serve versions of the same foods push the receipt up without changing what lands on your plate.
The USDA has commissioned a study on how much convenience and variety the Thrifty basket allows, to inform the next re-evaluation.
Wasted food is a cost you can cut
Researchers at Penn State, Yang Yu and Edward Jaenicke, studied about 4,000 households in the USDA’s National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey. Their 2020 paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics estimated that the average household wastes 31.9% of the food it gets, worth about $1,866 a year. Households with more fruit and vegetables in the cart wasted more, and bigger households wasted less.
Food you throw away is the one grocery cost that buys you nothing. You can shrink it without changing plans.
Where an example family lands
Say a family of four with kids 7 and 10 spends $1,250 on groceries in a month. That’s $226.30 more than the Thrifty plan and $124.20 more than Low-Cost. It’s also $138.20 less than Moderate-Cost and $428.70 less than Liberal.
Landing between two plans doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. The plans are four price points on a line, and your bill doesn’t have to match any one of them.
One month can also mislead. A birthday party, a holiday dinner or a big pantry restock can push you up a plan for a few weeks, while a month of eating down the freezer can pull it the other way. If last month had one of those, look at two or three months together.
Before your next grocery run
The USDA counts only food made at home in all four plans, which makes your grocery receipts the fair comparison and your takeout orders a separate question. Tonight, add up last month’s grocery receipts or the grocery charges on your card statement. Then find the row in the four-plan table where your total lands, and use the age rows to adjust it if your kids are younger or older than the USDA’s pair.