Restaurant vs. Home Cooking Calculator
See how much shifting a few restaurant or takeout meals a week to home cooking would save over a year, without giving up eating out entirely.
What this calculator does
How many restaurant or takeout meals you currently eat per week, their average cost, your home-cooked cost per meal, and how many of those meals you’d realistically shift home go in. It returns your current annual spending on those meals, the projected spending after the shift, and the total and per-meal savings.
The case for a partial shift
Most advice on cutting restaurant spending implicitly assumes an all-or-nothing choice — either you’re “eating out too much” or you’ve committed to cooking everything from scratch. Neither extreme describes how most households actually eat, and neither is what this calculator models. Instead, it asks how many meals per week you’d genuinely shift home, which produces a savings number grounded in a change you’re likely to actually sustain.
Why the per-meal savings figure is worth watching
The annual total is the headline number, but the per-meal savings figure answers a smaller, more useful question: is tonight’s specific decision to cook instead of order out worth it. That figure doesn’t change based on how many meals you’ve already shifted — it’s a constant rate that makes each individual choice easier to evaluate on its own, rather than only mattering as part of a grand annual plan.
What determines the size of the gap
The gap between restaurant and home cost varies enormously by what you typically order — a fast-food value meal costs much less than a sit-down dinner, and home-cooked cost varies just as much by what you cook. Running your own real average restaurant spending against your own real home-cooked cost, rather than a generic estimate of either, is what makes this calculator’s output meaningful for your actual budget.
For the time cost side of the same decision — not just the dollar cost — the meal prep vs. takeout calculator factors in how long cooking actually takes, and the meal kit vs. grocery calculator covers a middle option between fully home-cooked and eating out.
How this is calculated
current annual cost = restaurant meals/week × cost per meal × 52 projected annual cost = (meals/week − shifted) × restaurant cost × 52 + shifted × home cost × 52 annual savings = current − projected
Frequently asked questions
- How much could I save by cooking a few more meals a week?
- Multiply the difference between your average restaurant meal cost and your home-cooked cost by the number of meals you'd shift, then by 52 weeks. Shifting just three $22 restaurant meals a week to $5 home-cooked ones saves roughly $2,650 a year — a partial shift, not an all-or-nothing overhaul.
- Do I have to give up eating out to see savings?
- No — this calculator is built specifically around a partial shift, since that's what most households actually sustain. Modeling a realistic number of meals moved home, rather than an idealized "we'll never eat out again" plan, produces a savings estimate you're actually likely to hit.
- What counts as a "restaurant meal" here?
- Any meal you pay someone else to prepare and either eat out or bring home — sit-down restaurants, fast food, delivery and takeout all count the same way in this calculator, since the comparison is about who cooked it, not where you ate it.
- Why does the per-meal savings number matter as much as the annual total?
- Because it tells you the value of shifting just one more meal, which is a smaller, more concrete decision than committing to an annual savings target — useful for deciding, meal by meal, whether a specific night is worth cooking or worth going out.