There is no official answer. The last time anyone measured what Australian households actually spend on food, the reference period was the 2015-16 financial year, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics has published no later cycle of that survey since.
Every "average grocery bill" figure published in 2026 — including ones that disagree with each other by more than $100 a week — comes from a self-reported survey, not from measurement. That is why they disagree, and it is why matching your bill against one tells you almost nothing.
The short answer
| Figure | What it actually measures | Status |
|---|---|---|
| $236.97 a week | All-household average spend on food and non-alcoholic beverages, including meals out | ABS, official — but collected in 2015-16 |
| $204 a week | Self-reported "grocery" spend, all households | Finder Consumer Sentiment Tracker, accessed August 2026 |
| $111–$259 a week | Self-reported grocery spend, by household size | Canstar Blue survey of 2,879 shoppers, July 2025 |
Three things follow, and the third is the useful one.
The official figure is a decade old. The current figures are surveys of what people think they spend. And none of them define "groceries" the same way, so they were never comparable to begin with.
Why nobody official has the number
The Household Expenditure Survey was the instrument that answered this question. It asked households to record what they actually spent, in detail, and its latest cycle covers 2015-16, released in September 2017.
What replaced it does a different job. The Monthly Household Spending Indicator is built largely from aggregated, de-identified bank transaction data and supermarket administrative data. It is more current and far more frequent than a survey — but it measures aggregate household consumption across the economy, not what a household spends. It can tell you that national spending on food rose last month. It cannot tell you what your neighbours spend.
So the question "what is the average grocery bill in Australia?" has no authoritative 2026 answer, because the only instrument that could have produced one stopped running.
The last official figure, and what was actually in it
In 2015-16, Australian households spent an average of $236.97 a week on food and non-alcoholic beverages.
That number is routinely quoted as a grocery bill. It is not one.
The same survey found that households spent between $86 and $113 a week on meals out and fast food depending on how accessible their area was — the lower figure in limited and low accessibility areas, the higher in very high accessibility ones. On our arithmetic against the $236.97 total, that is somewhere between roughly 36% and 48% of the "food" figure going to restaurants, pubs, clubs and takeaway rather than to a supermarket.
This is the trap underneath the entire genre. "Food" in the official statistics includes eating out. "Groceries" in a consumer survey usually does not, except when the respondent counts the pub meal anyway, or the nappies, or the dog food, or the wine — and nobody asks them which they did.
Two figures built on different definitions cannot be compared, and a budgeting article that lines them up in a table is comparing nothing.
What the surveys say, by household size
The most useful of the self-reported figures break the number down by household size, because household size explains more of the variation than anything else. Canstar Blue surveyed 2,879 supermarket shoppers in July 2025 and reported:
| Household size | Average weekly grocery spend |
|---|---|
| 1 person | $111 |
| 2 people | $161 |
| 3 people | $194 |
| 4 people | $240 |
| 5 or more | $259 |
Use it as a rough sense of scale, not a target — and note the caveat the surveyors themselves attach. Canstar records that the figure is "a reported monetary cost—not indicative of basket size or groceries volume", because a higher number can simply mean someone bought non-grocery items on the same docket.
That is the honest limit of every figure in this genre. It measures what people say they spent at a supermarket, which is not the same as what they spent on food, and is not the same as what the food was worth.
What the current data does measure
The Consumer Price Index is measured properly, monthly, and it is the right place to look for direction rather than level.
In the year to June 2026, the CPI rose 3.8%, with food and non-alcoholic beverages up 3.3%.
But read the composition, because it repeats the same trap. Within that group, meals out and takeaway rose 4.0% and were the main contributor — driven by ingredient, wages and operating costs, which is a restaurant's cost base rather than a supermarket's. The number most often quoted as "grocery inflation" is being led by the part of the category that is not groceries.
That does not mean supermarket prices are flat. It means the headline overstates what is happening on the shelf, and anyone budgeting from it is budgeting from the wrong number.
The comparison that does hold
If you want a real, measured comparison, use a basket someone actually priced in shops rather than a spending average someone recalled.
CHOICE surveys the same basket across chains. In March 2026, across 16 items in 104 supermarkets in 27 locations, the totals without specials were:
| Chain | Basket total (16 items, no specials) |
|---|---|
| Aldi | $68.60 |
| Woolworths | $77.53 |
| Coles | $78.58 |
| IGA | $91.65 |
Read the caveat with it, because it is doing real work: the number of name-brand items differed by chain — one at Aldi, three at Coles and Woolworths, five at IGA, because IGA's home-brand range is smaller. The basket is a like-for-role comparison, not a like-for-like one. We went through what that result does and does not prove in the cheapest supermarket in Australia.
It is still worth more than any spending average, for one reason: someone stood in a shop and wrote the prices down.
Where your bill actually varies
Here is the part that reframes the question. If you take identical products — the same tin, the same box — and price them at Coles and at Woolworths on the same day, the two chains agree far more often than shoppers expect.
10,988 identical products priced at both Coles and Woolworths.
- Same price at both
- 46.9%
- Cheaper at Woolworths
- 28.2%
- Cheaper at Coles
- 24.9%
Where the two differ, the middle gap is $2.00 — about 28.6% of the dearer price. Across the whole set, taking whichever chain is cheaper on each product comes to 9.7% less than buying all of them at either one.
And most of that difference is a promotion rather than a different shelf price: 85.1% of the products where the two chains differ have at least one side on special.
Grovena’s own data, updated with each price collection — figures as at 27 September 2026. Current prices including anything on special that day, so the split moves week to week. The 9.7% is what the gap adds up to across every product in this set, not a saving on a real shop: collecting it would mean buying all of them and shopping both chains. Online prices, so in-store tickets and state-based variations sit outside it.
That panel is generated from our own catalogue and moves with each collection. It is not a claim that one chain is cheaper — on close to half of those products there is nothing at all to choose between them, and where they do differ, the wins split near-evenly between the two.
Which means the variable people optimise hardest — which chain am I loyal to — is close to the one that matters least. We looked at why the two majors sit on top of each other like this in why groceries are so expensive in Australia.
The variation that does move a bill sits somewhere else: in which specific products you buy, and in which week you buy them.
The panel puts a number on the second one. Where the two chains do differ, the large majority of those gaps have at least one side running a special — so the difference you can see between Coles and Woolworths is usually a promotion rather than a cheaper shelf price. That is a fact about this week, not about the chain. It expires, and next week it may run the other way.
Which is why timing beats loyalty. A staple at its normal shelf price and the same staple at half price is a wider gap than the one between the two chains typically is.
That is tedious to check by hand across three websites, which is why almost nobody does it. Price the things you actually buy — Grovena puts the prices it has matched for a product on the same card, showing the unit price alongside each one wherever we can verify it, so a 900g pack can be judged against a 1kg one. Where the catalogues do not line up, a card carries two prices rather than three. It is free and needs no account.
A better question than "am I average?"
The honest replacement for a national average is your own bill, measured against itself.
Price your actual basket, not a representative one. The twenty or so things you rebuy every fortnight decide most of your spend. A national average built from someone else's trolley cannot tell you whether yours is expensive.
Separate groceries from eating out before you judge either. Given how much of the official food figure is meals out, a household that cooks is not comparable to one that does not, and lumping them together is how people conclude they are overspending on groceries when they are not.
Compare unit prices, not shelf prices. It is the only way a 900g pack and a 1kg pack become the same question, and it is the single habit that most reliably changes what goes in the trolley. Unit pricing is part of Grovena's free tier, with no account needed.
Watch the timing on repeat staples. Since the two majors sit at an identical price on so many of the products we can compare directly, the week you buy is doing more work than the chain you pick. Knowing that a product you rebuy discounts every few weeks turns "buy it now at full price" into "buy two next week" — and that decision is only available if you can see how the price has behaved.
That last one is where Grovena Pro earns its place: saved shopping lists re-priced each week, price-drop alert emails on the products you track, and full price history charts. Pro is $5.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. It is built for the staples you rebuy on a schedule — buy the same things every fortnight and there is a pattern in them worth finding. The pricing page lists what sits in each tier.
Common questions
What is the average grocery bill in Australia?
There is no official current figure. The last ABS measurement covered 2015-16 and put all-household spending on food and non-alcoholic beverages — meals out included — at $236.97 a week. Current estimates come from self-reported consumer surveys rather than from measurement: Finder reports $204 a week, and Canstar Blue's July 2025 survey of 2,879 shoppers ranges from $111 for one person to $259 for a household of five or more.
How much should a family of four spend on groceries per week?
The figure most often quoted is $240 a week, from Canstar Blue's July 2025 survey. Treat it as a sense of scale rather than a target: it is self-reported, and Canstar notes it is a reported dollar cost rather than an indication of basket size, so a bigger number can just mean more non-grocery items on the same docket. What a household "should" spend depends on how much of its food is eaten out, dietary needs, where it shops and what it buys. A more useful benchmark is your own basket priced across chains, compared with itself over time.
Why do the published averages disagree so much?
Because they measure different things. Some include takeaway, some do not; some include household items, pet food or alcohol bought at the supermarket, some do not; and all of them rely on people estimating their own spending from memory, which is unreliable in a predictable direction. None of them are wrong so much as incomparable.
Is the ABS still measuring what households spend on groceries?
Not per household. The Household Expenditure Survey's latest cycle is 2015-16. The Monthly Household Spending Indicator that reports current household spending is compiled largely from aggregated bank and supermarket transaction data, and measures spending across the economy rather than a household-level average.
Does the "food inflation" figure tell me what my groceries cost?
Not directly, and it tends to overstate it. Food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 3.3% in the year to June 2026, against headline CPI of 3.8% — but within that group, meals out and takeaway rose 4.0% and were the main contributor. The number most often quoted as grocery inflation is being led by restaurant and takeaway costs, so it is a poor guide to what happened to the things you actually put in a trolley. (For the wider question of why prices got here, see why groceries are so expensive in Australia.)
Am I spending too much on groceries?
An average cannot tell you. What can is checking whether the specific items you buy repeatedly are available cheaper elsewhere, or cheaper in a different week. That is a per-product question, and it is the only version of "am I overpaying" that has an answer.
The short version
Australia has no current official average grocery bill, because the survey that measured it last ran for 2015-16. Its headline food figure of $236.97 a week included meals out — between $86 and $113 of it, depending on the area — so it was never a grocery bill in the first place.
Everything published since is a self-reported survey — $204 a week from one, $111 to $259 by household size from another — and the reason they disagree is that no two of them define groceries the same way.
The comparison worth making is not against a national average. It is against your own basket: the same products, priced across chains, in the week you are actually shopping. Start from your own basket, not somebody else's average.