Restaurant meals are set to get costlier at a faster pace than groceries this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest economic forecast. The agency’s Economic Research Service projects food-away-from-home prices rising 3.6 percent in 2026, while grocery store prices climb a slower 2.5 percent. That’s a wider split than the two categories have shown for most of the past several years, and it puts a clear dollar sign on a decision households make every week: cook at home or eat out.
USDA Puts 2026 Restaurant Inflation at 3.6 Percent, Groceries at 2.5 Percent
The Economic Research Service’s August 2026 Food Price Outlook lays out the gap in specific terms. Food-away-from-home prices — restaurant and other foodservice purchases — are forecast to rise 3.6 percent for all of 2026, with a 95-percent confidence range of 3.2 to 3.9 percent. Food-at-home prices, the grocery store basket, are forecast to rise 2.5 percent, with a range of 1.7 to 3.3 percent. Both figures average the full run of 2026 months against the full run of 2025 months, not just the latest single month, so they capture the year as a whole rather than one snapshot.
The pattern is already visible in the government’s monthly inflation data. Restaurant prices in July 2026 were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, while grocery prices were up 2.7 percent over the same span, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index report. Full-service restaurant meals rose 3.4 percent over the year and limited-service meals rose 3.3 percent, so the pressure is showing up at both sit-down restaurants and fast-food counters.
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Beef and Eggs Are Pulling Grocery Prices in Opposite Directions
The 2.5 percent grocery average hides a lot of movement inside individual aisles. ERS forecasts beef and veal prices to climb 9.8 percent in 2026 as a shrinking cattle herd tightens supply; federally inspected beef production fell almost 5 percent in July alone, according to USDA’s Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook. Fresh vegetables are forecast up 5.9 percent and sugar and sweets up 7.1 percent. Pulling the average down, egg prices are forecast to fall 30.8 percent in 2026 as flocks recover from an avian-flu outbreak that had pushed egg prices up more than 20 percent in each of the two prior years, and poultry prices are expected to rise just 0.5 percent. A household that buys a lot of beef and fresh produce will feel grocery inflation closer to the top of the range this year; a household that leans on eggs, poultry and dairy will see a bill that is close to flat.
Restaurant Prices Are Outrunning Their Own Twenty-Year Track Record
Restaurant inflation isn’t just fast in absolute terms — it is running ahead of its own history. ERS notes that the 3.6 percent food-away-from-home forecast tops that category’s 20-year average pace of 3.5 percent, while the 2.5 percent grocery forecast falls short of its 20-year average of 2.6 percent. That’s a continuation of the post-pandemic pattern: food-away-from-home prices rose 4.1 percent in 2024 and 3.8 percent in 2025, both well above their historical norm, while food-at-home prices rose just 1.2 percent in 2024 and 2.3 percent in 2025, both below theirs. The last time food inflation ran this hot in either direction was 2022, when overall food prices jumped 9.9 percent — the fastest increase since 1979 — as an earlier avian-flu outbreak, the war in Ukraine and broad inflationary pressure pushed food-at-home prices up 11.4 percent and food-away-from-home prices up 7.7 percent. Restaurants also carry labor, rent and utility costs that don’t ease just because one ingredient gets cheaper, which is part of why the category doesn’t swing the way farm-driven grocery prices do.
Food Already Claims Nearly a Tenth of Take-Home Pay
The gap matters because it’s stacking on top of an expense that already takes a real bite out of household budgets. In 2025, U.S. consumers spent an average of 9.7 percent of their disposable personal income on food, according to ERS’s Food Expenditure Series. That split almost evenly between the two categories: 4.8 percent went to groceries and 4.9 percent to restaurants and other food away from home. Three decades earlier, in 1997, the split looked different — 6.1 percent on groceries and 4.3 percent on restaurants — so the shift toward eating out has been building for years before this year’s price gap opened wider.
Those percentages translate into enormous totals. Combined U.S. food spending by consumers, businesses and government reached $2.51 trillion in 2025, with food away from home accounting for $1.41 trillion of that total and food at home accounting for $1.10 trillion, according to ERS’s companion chart on total food expenditures. Food-away-from-home spending has grown faster than food-at-home spending for years, even before this year’s inflation gap widened further — a trend this forecast is set to extend rather than reverse.
What the Widening Gap Adds Up to on a Weekly Bill
To put the forecast in dollar terms: a household that spent $100 a week eating out in 2025 would be looking at roughly $103.60 a week if 2026 restaurant prices land exactly on the ERS midpoint forecast — a simple illustration built from the published growth rate, not a figure USDA publishes itself. The same household’s $100-a-week grocery bill would land closer to $102.50 under the grocery forecast. On a single week’s receipt, the difference is a few dollars. Carried across 52 weeks, and layered onto categories like beef that are already forecast to run far hotter than the average, it’s enough to change which side of the kitchen counter a family’s savings actually build up on. ERS updates the Food Price Outlook every month as new Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index numbers arrive, so the next release will show whether this year’s restaurant-grocery gap keeps widening or starts to close.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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