A typical restaurant meal costs more than three times what a home-cooked one does. Before you cut back, total one month of restaurant, takeout, delivery, and coffee charges from your card and bank statements, then start cooking the meals you order only out of habit.
As a benchmark, the average household spent $4,142 eating out in 2025, about $345 a month, and $6,491 on groceries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Eating out took about 39 cents of every dollar spent on food.
The USDA’s moderate-cost food plan estimates what a healthy diet costs when every meal is cooked at home. For an adult age 20 to 50 in a two-person household, that works out to about $4.40 a meal. Restaurants that use Toast, a checkout system, charged a median $14.84 for a burger in October 2026, more than three times that $4.40, before tax, tip, a drink, or a delivery fee.
To find your own figure, pull last month’s card and bank statements and sort every food charge into four piles: restaurants, takeout, delivery, and coffee. The biggest pile is where to start, since it has the most to cut.
Then move meals home with three changes.
- In that pile, start with the meals you buy only out of habit, like takeout ordered because nobody planned dinner.
- Keep ingredients for three 20-minute dinners on hand, such as tacos, stir-fry, or pasta.
- Plan one meal out each week, so cutting back doesn’t mean giving up restaurants.
Say a couple finds $780 in restaurant and delivery charges last month and cooks three more dinners a week, which cuts the charges to $400 a month. At $4.40 a meal, those dinners add about $115 a month in groceries, so the couple keeps about $265 a month, roughly $3,200 a year.
Each dinner you move home saves about $10 a person before tax and tip, the gap between that $14.84 burger and a $4.40 home meal.
Compare the best budgeting apps for one that sorts those four piles for you each month.
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