Average Cost of Groceries per Month in Canada: For One Person, a Couple and a Family of Four
What Canadians Really Spend, What a Healthy Basket Costs, and How to Set Your Own Number
The average cost of groceries per month in Canada depends on one question before any other: how many people are you feeding? Statistics Canada’s most recent Survey of Household Spending puts the typical household’s grocery bill at $8,579 a year, about $715 a month, but a person living alone spent $383 a month, a couple without children $682, and a couple with children $1,080. Canada’s Food Price Report expects a family of four to spend up to $1,464 a month on food in 2026.
Those four numbers are the reason a single average grocery bill is almost useless on its own, and why the question people actually type into a search box is more specific: how much do groceries cost per month for one person, what is the average cost of groceries for a family of four, or simply how much should I spend on groceries a month. This guide answers each of those with the latest Canadian figures, from Statistics Canada, from Canada’s Food Price Report and from the public health units that price a healthy basket of food every year. If you want the whole budget rather than the food line, our guide to average monthly expenses in Canada covers every category.
One note on what is being counted. Unless stated otherwise, the figures below are food bought from stores: groceries, not restaurants, takeout or coffee. The average household spent a further $3,316 at restaurants in 2023, about $276 a month, and that line grew 51.5% in two years. Keeping the two apart is the first step toward a grocery budget that holds.
What the Average Cost of Groceries per Month Looks Like by Household
Here is the full set from the 2023 survey, converted to monthly figures. The average grocery bill for one person was $4,595 for the year, about $383 a month. A couple without children spent $8,178, about $682 a month, which is $341 each, and that is the most useful benchmark for the average cost of groceries for two people. A couple with children spent $12,954, about $1,080 a month, and a lone parent household $8,099, about $675 a month. Spread the national figure across the average household of 2.4 people and grocery costs work out to roughly $300 per person. The person living alone pays about 28% more than that, because a single shopper cannot split a bulk pack or a bag of potatoes with anyone, and more of what they buy goes to waste.
Who is at the table changes everything
Average monthly spending on food from stores in 2023. Tap a household to compare it with the others.
| Household | Groceries per year | Per month | Restaurants per month |
|---|
What Is in the Average Canadian Grocery Cart
Statistics Canada breaks the $8,579 into eight categories, and the ranking surprises most people. The largest line is not meat but the catch all category of non-alcoholic beverages and other food products, at $2,141 a year. In Statistics Canada’s own breakdown of the survey, that category covers pop and juice ($599), condiments and spices ($377), sugar and confectionery ($343) and frozen and prepared foods. Meat follows at $1,525, dairy products and eggs at $1,194, fruit and nuts at $1,063, vegetables at $1,022, bakery products at $850, cereal grains and cereal products at $520 and fish and seafood at $265. Per month, that is roughly $127 on meat, $100 on dairy and eggs, $89 on fruit, $85 on vegetables and $71 on bread and baked goods.
The two year changes tell the price story. Statistics Canada’s analysis found household spending on chicken up 24%, on citrus fruit up 51%, on bread up 31%, on ready to eat pastry up 49% and on pasta up 38% between 2021 and 2023, while spending on salmon fell 27% and on pork fell 16%. Households did not suddenly eat more bread; bread cost more, and the cart quietly rearranged itself around the prices.
Where $715 a month at the grocery store goes
Tap a slice or a category to see what is inside it and how spending changed between 2021 and 2023.
Tap a category
Each slice opens to show the biggest items inside it, from Statistics Canada's breakdown of the survey, and whether spending on them rose or fell in two years.
| Category | Per year | Per month |
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How Much Grocery Prices Have Risen, and Where They Are Now
Food prices in Canada rose 9.8% in 2022, the largest annual increase since 1981, then 7.8% in 2023, 2.2% in 2024 and 3.5% in 2025, according to Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index for food purchased from stores. Canada’s Food Price Report 2026 puts the cumulative effect plainly: food costs 27% more than it did five years ago. The pace has eased since. In September 2026, Canada’s grocery prices were 1.7% higher than a year earlier, down from 2.8% in August, and fresh vegetables (down 2.9%) and sugar and confectionery (down 2.7%) were actually cheaper than the year before. The report still expects food prices to rise another 4 to 6% over 2026, with meat up 5 to 7%, and 2025 was a reminder of how uneven that can be: coffee rose 20.3% and fresh or frozen beef 13.5% while fresh fruit rose just 2.5%.
What that looks like on the shelf: in August 2026, Statistics Canada’s average retail prices across Canada were $5.49 for two litres of milk, $4.83 for a dozen eggs, $3.63 for a 675 gram loaf of white bread, $5.68 for a pound of butter, $16.75 a kilogram for ground beef, $14.41 a kilogram for chicken breasts, $6.47 a kilogram for apples, $1.89 a kilogram for bananas, $5.17 a kilogram for potatoes and $9.73 for a two kilogram bag of white rice. Canadians have responded by shopping differently. The share of food sales going to warehouse clubs, supercentres and dollar stores rose from 21.6% in early 2021 to 25.9% by late 2022, and in 2024 those stores grew their food sales five times faster than grocery stores did.
How fast grocery prices have been rising
Yearly change in the price of food purchased from stores, from the Consumer Price Index. Tap a bar for the story behind it.
What moved most in 2025
- Coffee+20.3%
- Fresh or frozen beef+13.5%
- Confectionery+7.1%
- Meat overall+5.8%
- Fresh fruit+2.5%
What ten staples cost across Canada, August 2026
Statistics Canada's average retail prices. Brands, package sizes and your province will move these up or down.
Average Grocery Bill by Province
Where you live shifts the average cost of groceries per month by more than a third. Newfoundland and Labrador households spent the most on groceries in 2023, $10,809 a year or about $901 a month, followed by Alberta at $828 a month, Manitoba at $798 and Saskatchewan at $794. Quebec came in at $720, British Columbia at $711, New Brunswick at $707 and Prince Edward Island at $696. The lowest grocery bills were in Ontario, $665 a month, and Nova Scotia, $653. Spending is not the same as prices, though. Ontario’s low grocery figure sits beside the second highest restaurant spending in the country, after Alberta, and in Newfoundland and Labrador groceries take 16.2% of everything households spend, the highest share in Canada, partly because of how far the food has to travel.
The territories are a different scale again: households in Iqaluit and Yellowknife spent more than $16,000 a year on food in 2023. For 2026, the Food Price Report expects grocery price increases above the national average in Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec, and below it in British Columbia and Manitoba. The province cannot be budgeted away, but it is worth knowing which way your local prices are leaning when you set a target.
Average grocery bill by province
Average household spending on food from stores. Tap a province to see how big a share of its spending groceries take, and what it spends at restaurants.
| Province | Per year | Per month |
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How Much Should Groceries Cost? What a Healthy Basket Costs
Spending tells you what people do. Public health units measure something different: what a basic healthy diet costs if you buy the lowest priced option of every item on a standard list. In Ontario’s 2024 Nutritious Food Basket survey, reported by Public Health Ontario, that came to $1,229 a month for a family of four (two adults, a teenage boy and a girl aged 4 to 8), ranging from $1,151 in Chatham-Kent to $1,518 in the northwest of the province. A single adult man aged 31 to 50 needed $427 a month, an older woman living alone $305, and a parent with two children under six $719. Lambton County’s 2025 survey landed in the same place, at $1,197 for the family of four.
Line those up and the picture is coherent. A couple with children actually spends $1,080 a month on groceries, a basic healthy basket for a family of four costs about $1,200, and the Food Price Report’s $1,464 adds restaurant meals and the 2026 price forecast on top. For one person, actual spending ($383) and the healthy basket ($427) sit within $50 of each other, which makes $400 a reasonable monthly food budget for one person to start from. The Credit Counselling Society’s budgeting guideline is that food should take 10 to 20% of take home pay, and for most households it does. The strain shows at the bottom of the income range: the lowest income fifth of households spent $5,581 on groceries in 2023, 13.9% of everything they spent, against 9.9% for the highest fifth, and one in four people in the provinces faced some level of food insecurity that year.
The estimator below turns all of this into a number for your own household. It uses the public health costings, with the small household adjustment they apply, to estimate a healthy basic basket for the people you feed, and it shows what households like yours actually spend.
How much should groceries cost for your household?
Build your household below. You get a healthy basic basket figure based on public health food costing, what households like yours actually spend, and a weekly number to shop with. Nothing leaves your device.
Who are you feeding?tap plus or minus
Optional
When groceries alone pass a fifth of take home income, the fix is rarely in the cart. A free, confidential conversation with a money coach looks at the whole budget.
Talk to a money coach for freeAverage Cost of Groceries per Month: Turning the Benchmark into Your Budget
The evidence points to one method. Take the number the estimator gives you, or the household figure above that fits, and divide it by 4.33 to calculate a grocery budget for the week. Then track four weeks of grocery receipts with our free Spending Tracker, or simply keep them in an envelope, before you change anything; a target without a baseline is a wish. If your real number comes in above the benchmark, the savings are well documented. Buying store brands instead of name brands saves about 25%, shopping at a discount banner saves at least 10%, price matching flyers saves roughly another 10%, and shopping with a list cuts impulse buying by up to 23%. Our 12 ways to save big on groceries and 25 budget grocery shopping tips walk through each one, and there is a separate guide for a single person’s grocery budget, where food waste is the biggest lever.
If groceries are taking more than a fifth of your take home pay, trimming the cart may not be enough on its own, and that is worth saying plainly rather than pretending a coupon fixes it. The problem is usually the whole budget, not the food line, and our free Budget Calculator will show you where. A free, confidential conversation with a money coach at the Credit Counselling Society, a non-profit organization, can turn that picture into a plan. The average cost of groceries per month in Canada gives you the benchmark; booking a free appointment is the next step when the benchmark says the budget needs more than a better shopping list.
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