Five free calculators for the actual cost of running a household: what your take-home pay allows against the 50/30/20 guideline, what your household should budget for groceries, what your everyday fuel or commute costs, how your grocery spending compares meal by meal, and what a home-cooked recipe actually costs per serving.
These five calculators cover the recurring costs of actually running a household: what your take-home pay allows against a real budgeting guideline, what groceries and meals should cost your household size, and what your everyday commute or fuel spending looks like.
Start with the Personal Budget Calculator to see where your income is actually going against the 50/30/20 guideline, then use the Grocery Budget Calculator and Meal Planning Calculator to check your food spending against a government benchmark instead of a guess. The Recipe Cost Worksheet goes one level deeper, per dish.
Where is my money actually going, and how does it compare to the 50/30/20 guideline?
What is my monthly and weekly grocery budget for my household, and what does that work out to per person per day?
What's my real daily commute or monthly gas budget, and how does it compare to a different vehicle?
What should my household actually be spending on groceries, and how does my own spending compare?
What does this recipe actually cost per serving, and what should I charge or budget for it?
The USDA's Food Plans publish four spending tiers, Thrifty through Liberal, by age and household size, updated monthly, which is a more honest benchmark than a single national average grocery number. The grocery and meal-planning calculators on this page also check the BLS food-at-home price index so the comparison reflects this year's prices, not last year's.
How we source our numbers: the method we follow, and how we correct a number when it changes, is on our methodology page; our sourcing and correction rules are on our editorial policy page.
Food costs vary meaningfully by region, and the national USDA tiers are a starting benchmark, not a promise of what groceries cost in your specific area. Compare your own receipts against the Grocery Budget Calculator's tier for your household size first, then adjust for your own area if your real prices run consistently higher or lower.
The USDA food plan tiers the grocery and meal-planning calculators use assume mostly at-home cooking; if your household eats out often, treat the result as a floor for grocery spending, not your full food budget.
The USDA Food Plans monthly cost reports publish four spending tiers (Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, Liberal) by age and household size, updated monthly. The Grocery Budget Calculator and Meal Planning Calculator both check your own spending against those same published tiers rather than a single national average.
It's a starting guideline, not a hard rule, and it runs into trouble fastest in high-cost housing markets. The Personal Budget Calculator still shows you the gap against the guideline even when housing alone exceeds it, so you can see exactly how far off and where the rest of the budget needs to flex.
A per-serving recipe cost has to account for partial ingredients you don't use up, not just the receipt total. The Recipe Cost Worksheet prices each ingredient by the actual amount used in the recipe, which is the number that matters if you're deciding what to charge or budget per serving.