There’s a number floating around every household kitchen in America right now, and most people feel it even if they can’t quite name it. It sits between “getting by” and “eating well,” between stress-shopping on a tight budget and tossing whatever looks good into the cart without much thought. That number is what defines comfortable eating in 2026, and it turns out to be both more specific and more complicated than most people expect. The answer depends on who you ask, how many mouths you’re feeding, and where in the country you happen to live.
What the USDA Says “Comfortable” Actually Looks Like
The USDA produces four food plans at successively higher cost levels: the Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal Food Plans, illustrating how a healthy diet can be achieved at various costs. Of these, the Moderate-Cost plan is widely considered the benchmark for comfortable, nutritious eating without extravagance. The Moderate-Cost Food Plan represents food expenditures in the second from the top quartile of food spending. In practical terms, it assumes all meals are home-prepared and covers a realistic, varied grocery cart without requiring extreme frugality.
For 2026, the USDA moderate-cost plan suggests a single adult should aim for about $328 to $388 per month depending on age and gender, while a couple can expect to spend around $800 monthly. On average, the cost of food for a single adult male with a moderate USDA food budget is $465 a month, while a single adult female is approximately $392. These figures carry real weight because they come from official monthly cost-of-food reports updated for current inflation, making them the closest thing America has to an official definition of eating comfortably.
The Real Average: What Households Are Actually Spending
The average U.S. household spends about $504 per month on groceries, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story because it lumps together single people, couples, families of six and more. When you break it down by family size, the picture becomes much more revealing. Data from September 2025 shows that the average family of four on the thrifty food plan spends $1,002.20 per month on groceries, which is more than $12,000 per year, while that same family would spend $1,631.10 per month on the liberal monthly plan, amounting to $19,573 per year.
A family of four that includes one adult male, one adult female and two older children ages 9 to 11 would spend approximately $1,389 monthly on a moderate food budget, with the full range starting at $1,100 on a more price-conscious plan and up to $1,675 on a more liberal budget. According to Purdue University’s Consumer Food Insights Report, households reported spending an average of $133 weekly on groceries and $72 on dining out in December 2025. That weekly grocery figure alone translates to roughly $576 a month, confirming that the BLS average is no exaggeration.
The Cumulative Weight of Food Inflation Since 2020
Since February 2020, grocery prices have jumped 29% cumulatively. That’s not a one-year blip. It’s a foundational shift in what food costs, and it has permanently reset what “normal” spending looks like for every American household. Food prices rose by 2.3 percent in 2024 and 2.9 percent in 2025, slower than they had increased during 2020 to 2023, with food-at-home prices increasing by 1.2 percent in 2024 and 2.3 percent in 2025, lower than their historical average pace of growth of 2.6 percent per year.
Looking ahead, the outlook is moderately reassuring for grocery shoppers specifically. Grocery prices are expected to rise just 1.7% in 2026, well below the 20-year average, despite a steep 9.4% projected increase in beef prices, according to the USDA’s latest food price forecast released on January 28, 2026. However, food-away-from-home prices continue to climb more aggressively, with restaurant and dining costs rising 4.1% in 2024, 3.8% in 2025, and projected to increase another 4.6% in 2026, reflecting higher labor and operating costs in the food service sector.
The Items Driving Your Budget Higher in 2026
Not all grocery categories are moving in the same direction. Some items are squeezing budgets harder than others, and knowing which ones helps explain why a supposedly “moderate” budget can feel insufficient for some families. In 2026, among the 15 food-at-home categories examined in the Food Price Outlook, prices for 6 categories are predicted to grow faster than their 20-year historical average rate of growth, including beef and veal, other meats, fresh vegetables, sugar and sweets, nonalcoholic beverages, and other foods. Beef and veal prices are predicted to increase 9.4 percent in 2026.
The beef industry is facing higher costs at multiple levels: drought conditions in key cattle-producing regions have reduced herd sizes, making cattle more expensive to raise, and feed prices remain high, adding to overall production expenses, all of which contributes to the rising retail prices consumers see at the grocery store. On the more optimistic side, prices for eggs, dairy products, and pork are predicted to decline in 2026 compared to 2025, which should offer some relief to households that leaned heavily on those proteins during the most painful inflation years.
Where You Live Changes Everything
The number that defines comfortable eating isn’t fixed. Geography plays a genuinely dramatic role in what any given household pays for the same basket of food. Residents in the Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina area of Hawaii pay the most for food every month at $536 per person, while people living in Butler County, Kentucky pay the least at $285 per person. That’s nearly a $250 monthly gap per person, which across a family of four adds up to a difference of roughly $12,000 per year for the exact same nutritional outcome.
Food costs in urban areas tend to be 10% to 15% higher than food costs in rural areas, while costs in coastal cities are generally the most expensive. State-level burden also matters. Louisiana residents are the most cost-burdened by grocery spending, with the typical household spending about 13% of its income on groceries. In a recent survey by Harris and Axios, nearly half of respondents said it is harder to afford groceries now than it was a year ago, while just 19% say it is easier.
Income Shapes the Definition of “Comfortable” More Than Any Budget Plan
The phrase “comfortable eating” carries a very different meaning depending on a household’s financial position. The USDA moderate plan assumes everyone starts from the same baseline, but income inequality means that identical grocery bills represent vastly different levels of sacrifice. In 2023, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,278 on food, representing 32.6 percent of after-tax income, while households in the middle income quintile spent an average of $8,989 on food, representing 13.5 percent of after-tax income. The gap between those two percentages is the real story behind America’s grocery budget divide.
Seven percent of adults said that members of their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the prior month, while an additional 27 percent said that members of their household had enough to eat but not always the kinds of food they wanted to eat. Meanwhile, the food insecurity rate for 2025 was 14.2%, which was 1.7 percentage points higher than 2024, according to Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability. The majority of survey respondents, 82%, modified their shopping behaviors in 2025 in response to economic pressure, a figure that underscores just how broadly the squeeze has been felt across income levels.
