How Much Do Canadians Spend on Groceries? (2026)

The average Canadian household spent $8,659 on groceries in 2023, or roughly $722 a month. That’s the measured number, from Statistics Canada, and it sits a long way below the $17,571 figure that ran in headlines across the country last winter. Both numbers are real. They answer completely different questions, and if you’ve ever read a grocery article and come away certain you must be doing something wrong, the gap between the two is probably why.

How much does the average Canadian household spend on groceries?

Canadian households spent an average of $8,659 on food purchased from stores in 2023, up 7.4% from 2021, according to Statistics Canada’s Survey of Household Spending (opens in a new tab). That’s about $722 a month, or $167 a week. Households spent $3,351 on food from restaurants over the same year, and total food spending averaged $12,046.

Food was the third-largest thing households bought in 2023, at 15.7% of everything they spent on goods and services. Only shelter (32.1%) and transportation (15.8%) took more.

Read the average knowing what’s inside it

This figure comes from a survey of 9,991 households across the ten provinces, and it averages across every household type. Nearly a third of them, 30.4%, were one person living alone. So the $8,659 blends a single person’s cart with a family of five’s, which is exactly why so few people recognize their own bill in it. It’s the same trap that makes average savings figures so discouraging to read: an average describes a population, not a person.

It also spreads unevenly by income. Households in the lowest income fifth put 17.9% of their spending toward food, against 14.6% for the highest fifth.

What the average cart is actually made of

Statistics Canada breaks food from stores into eight categories (opens in a new tab). The ranking surprises most people.

The largest line isn’t meat. It’s the grab-bag of soft drinks, bottled water, condiments, candy and snack foods, at $2,153 a year. Bakery products climbed fastest of all, up 23.4%, driven by ready-to-eat pastry ($236, up 49.4%) and bread ($224, up 31.0%). Fish and seafood went the other way, down 11.5%, with salmon spending falling more than a quarter as its price ran as high as $29.10 a kilogram in March 2023.

Why the $17,571 headline is not your grocery bill

Canada’s Food Price Report 2026 (opens in a new tab) predicts a family of four will spend up to $17,571.79 on food this year. Divide that by twelve and you get about $1,464 a month, which is the number a lot of people end up measuring themselves against. The report’s own wording describes something much narrower, and three qualifiers get dropped on the way to the headline.

It’s a maximum, not an expectation. The report forecasts food prices rising 4% to 6% in 2026. To build the household figures, the authors write that they “use the highest end of the predicted scale (for this year, 6%)” and multiply the previous year’s observed costs by it. The $17,571.79 is the top of the range, and the report writes “up to” each time it states the figure in the text.

It’s one specific household. That family of four is a man aged 31 to 50, a woman aged 31 to 50, a boy aged 14 to 18 and a girl aged 9 to 13. Two adults and two growing teenagers is close to the hungriest four-person household you can assemble.

It assumes you never eat out. The report’s own limitations section states that the calculations “assume that Canadians are exclusively preparing and consuming meals at home.” They also build in a 5% food waste allowance and exclude delivery fees, online grocery service charges and the cost of specialized diets.

So what it produces is a nutrition-cost model rather than a spending survey. It answers “what would it cost this family to feed itself entirely at home, in a bad year for prices?” Statistics Canada answers “what did households actually pay?” Neither is wrong. Comparing your receipt to the first one is.

What should your household spend on groceries?

The Food Price Report is far more useful one person at a time. It publishes a predicted maximum annual food cost for every age and gender, and the household totals are simply those figures added together. The famous family of four is $4,497.26 plus $4,035.10 plus $5,020.88 plus $4,018.55, which comes to $17,571.79 exactly.

Add up your own household and you get a ceiling for feeding everyone at home this year. Two adults in their thirties come to $8,532.36, about $711 a month. A couple in their sixties comes to $8,319.24. A single woman in her twenties comes to $4,114.39, or roughly $343 a month.

Treat that as the top of your range rather than a target. If you eat out sometimes, part of that money moves to a restaurant line instead, which is exactly what Statistics Canada measured happening.

Are grocery prices still going up in 2026?

Yes, though more slowly than they were. Prices for food bought from stores rose 3.9% year over year in June 2026, easing from 4.3% in May, while the all-items Consumer Price Index rose 2.8%. As Statistics Canada put it in the June release (opens in a new tab), June “was the 17th consecutive month that grocery price inflation outpaced the all-items CPI.”

Slower growth in fresh fruit (+1.7%) drove most of the easing. Working against it were fresh and frozen chicken (+5.7%), bread, rolls and buns (+6.0%) and frozen food preparations (+2.7%). Step back further and the strain is clearer: by the Food Price Report’s reckoning, food costs 27% more than it did five years ago. Prices climbing faster than pay squeezes a budget from both ends, and they do the same thing to money sitting in savings.

Here’s what the Food Price Report expects for the rest of 2026.

Meat leads, mostly on beef and chicken supply. The authors point to trade disputes with the United States, the Canadian dollar, labour markets and shifts in food manufacturing and retail as the pressures behind the range.

Where the money actually is

Most grocery advice starts with coupons and flyers. The measured data points somewhere else first.

The largest single lever for most households is the split between the two food lines. Restaurant food accounted for another $3,351, or 28% of everything households spent on food. Moving even a small share of that back to the kitchen changes more than a careful trip around the store does.

Inside the store, the biggest category is the one nobody budgets for. Soft drinks, condiments, candy and snack foods came to $2,153, more than meat. And where you live matters more than any single habit: households in Newfoundland and Labrador spent $10,892 on food from stores, well above the national average. If groceries are crowding out everything else, our guide to making a budget in Canada shows where the line is meant to sit.

If money is tight, there’s also cash on the table. The Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit (opens in a new tab) replaced the GST/HST credit in July 2026 and came with a 25% increase that runs until 2031. Filing a tax return is the entire application. Our guide to saving on a low income in Canada walks through it alongside the other benefits people miss.

Turning a smaller grocery bill into tickets

Cutting a grocery bill is genuinely satisfying, right up until you notice that nothing visibly changed. The $40 you didn’t spend blends into your chequing account, and by the following Tuesday there’s no evidence you did anything at all. That’s the part that makes people stop.

Lodavo is a free app that gives the effort somewhere to land. It connects to your Canadian bank account, so you can track your savings each week and earn free tickets for a weekly cash draw as they grow. Lodavo never holds your money, so nothing has to move for any of it to work. Every week at least $100 goes to a user, and the top prize is $10,000. An ordinary week where you shaved $40 off the shop suddenly has something attached to it.

Know your number, then do something with it

A national average is the least useful thing here. What matters is that $8,659 describes households nothing like yours as often as it describes yours, and that the scarier $17,571 was never a grocery bill in the first place. Build your own ceiling from the per-person table, compare it to what you actually spend, and you have a real number instead of a headline.

Then give the difference a destination. Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and start earning tickets for the weekly draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.