Food accounts for 12.5 percent of American households’ budgets

With a 12.5-percent share, food ranked third behind housing (32.9 percent) and transportation (17 percent) in a typical American household’s 2015 expenditures. Breaking down food spending further, 7.2 percent of expenditures were spent at the grocery store and 5.4 percent at restaurants. Price changes for the items in the different budget categories relative to each other play a role in the categories’ shares of annual household consumer expenditures. Over the last 10 years, retail food price inflation has often outpaced economy-wide inflation. Between 2006 and 2015, prices for all U.S. goods and services rose an average of 2 percent per year, while food prices increased an average of 2.7 percent. Despite higher food price inflation, food’s share of consumer expenditures fell slightly (0.1 percentage points) over the decade, as the budget shares for health care and personal insurance and pensions rose. Food’s share of consumer expenditures may be smaller in 2016 as grocery store food prices fell by 1.3 percent in 2016. This chart appears in the ERS data product, Ag and Food Statistics: Charting the Essentials.

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