Published by Instant Press on behalf of Fight For A Living Wage.
Groceries cost roughly a quarter more than they did in 2019. That figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics food-at-home index, which tracks what shoppers pay at the store rather than what they pay for a prepared meal. The U.S. Department of Agriculture supplies the other half of the picture: households in the lowest fifth of the income distribution spend close to a third of their income on food, while households in the top fifth spend around 8 percent. A 25 percent run-up in grocery prices therefore hits those two groups with nothing like equal force.
What the grocery index has done since 2019
BLS splits food inflation into two series. Food at home covers groceries. Food away from home covers restaurants, cafeterias, and other prepared meals. The two move independently, and conflating them produces bad conclusions.
The food-at-home index rose about 11 percent in 2022, which BLS reported as the sharpest annual increase in that series since 1979. Increases in the range of 3 to 4 percent arrived in 2020 and 2021, and roughly 5 percent followed in 2023. By 2024 grocery inflation had cooled to around 1 percent for the year, according to BLS.
Cooling is not reversal. A price index measures the current level against a base period, so a slow year sits on top of the fast ones rather than canceling them. Compounded across 2019 through 2024, the food-at-home series leaves grocery prices roughly 25 percent above where they started. Anyone citing a current reading should pull it from the BLS Consumer Price Index release rather than from a headline, because the monthly and annual figures get quoted interchangeably and they are not the same measurement.
Groceries and restaurants pulled apart
Through 2024 the two food series moved at different speeds. BLS data show food away from home rising about 4 percent over the year while food at home rose about 1 percent. Restaurant prices carry labor, rent, insurance, and service costs that do not fall when a commodity price falls, so that index tends to climb on a steadier slope and respond less to a good harvest or a drop in diesel prices.
USDA’s Food Expenditure Series shows Americans now spend a bit more than half of their total food dollars away from home. That split changes how a household experiences published inflation numbers. A family that eats nearly every meal at home sits fully exposed to the grocery series and gets no relief from a slower restaurant reading. A household with more income spreads its food spending across both, which softens the swing in either one.
Food’s share of the household budget
USDA reports that Americans spent about 11 percent of disposable personal income on food in recent years, the highest share the agency has recorded in roughly three decades. That aggregate conceals the spread that matters. USDA’s expenditure data broken out by income quintile put food at close to a third of income for the lowest-earning fifth of households and around 8 percent for the highest-earning fifth.
The gap exists because food spending has a hard floor. A household can postpone a dentist visit or drive a car another two years. Eating does not wait. Economists have described this pattern since the nineteenth century, and USDA’s quintile data show it holding in current American spending.
USDA also publishes the Thrifty Food Plan, its estimate of what a minimally adequate diet prepared at home costs. As of 2024 that plan ran close to $1,000 a month for a reference family of four. The plan assumes cooking from scratch, no restaurant meals, and no waste, which makes it a floor rather than a realistic grocery bill.
Wages measured against food prices
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and has not moved since 2009, per the U.S. Department of Labor. Full-time year-round work at that rate produces about $15,080 before taxes. Set that against USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan at close to $1,000 a month and groceries alone for a family of four would consume roughly four-fifths of the gross wage, before rent, before a utility bill, before a bus pass.
At the other end of the comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau put median household income at about $80,000 as of 2023. You can pull current income tables from the Census income program. For a household at that median, the same $1,000 monthly food floor absorbs about 15 percent of pre-tax income. The dollar amount is identical. The pressure is not.
Wage growth across the 2022 spike lagged food prices for many workers, which is why real spending power fell even as nominal paychecks rose. BLS publishes real earnings alongside nominal earnings for exactly this reason. For a household-level view of what local costs require, MIT maintains a county-by-county living wage estimate that prices food alongside housing, childcare, and transport.
Who absorbs the increase
USDA’s household food security survey found about 13.5 percent of U.S. households food insecure in 2023, meaning roughly one in eight households had limited or uncertain access to adequate food at some point during the year. That measure captures the outcome of the price trends above rather than the prices themselves, and it moved in the same direction.
Low-wage households also have fewer ways to absorb a price increase. Buying in bulk requires cash on hand and storage. Driving to a cheaper store requires a car and the time to use it. Waiting for a sale requires a pantry deep enough to wait. Each of those substitutions is available to a household with savings and unavailable to one without, so the measured average price increase understates what the squeeze costs at the bottom.
Reading these numbers without getting fooled
Three habits keep food cost figures honest. First, check whether a quoted number describes a monthly change, a twelve-month change, or a cumulative change since a base year, because all three circulate as “food inflation.” Second, check whether it covers food at home, food away from home, or both. Third, check whether it reports an average or a median, since averages in spending data get pulled upward by high-income households.
Food is one line in a larger affordability problem that includes housing, healthcare, childcare, transport, education, and retirement. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3) nonprofit, argues that the squeeze comes from all of those costs outrunning wages at once rather than from the wage floor alone, and tracks these affordability figures in one place so the food numbers can be read next to the rest.
The underlying series are public and worth checking directly. BLS updates the Consumer Price Index monthly with the food-at-home and food-away-from-home components broken out. USDA updates the Food Expenditure Series, the Thrifty Food Plan cost, and the household food security report on their own schedules. Those releases, read together, say something the aggregate inflation rate alone cannot: the same percentage increase in food prices is a rounding error for one household and a monthly crisis for another, and the difference comes down to what share of income was already going to groceries before prices moved.