A century ago food ate over 40% of the American household budget; today it is barely an eighth.

Name: Food (charted by MacroSnaps)
Creator: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Food13%(2024)Housing33%(2024)Transport17%(2024)Health care8%(2024)Everything else29%(2024)

How the US household budget divides, 1901 to 2024. Percent of spending. Food (bottom) has shrunk from over 40% to about an eighth as housing and health care grew.

Why this is happening

Farm productivity exploded: mechanisation, fertiliser, hybrid seeds and better logistics meant ever fewer farmers fed ever more people, so food got cheaper in real terms decade after decade.
Incomes rose far faster than food prices, so even as families ate more and ate out more, food shrank as a slice of the budget.
What food gave up, housing and health care took: both claim a bigger share of the budget than they did a century ago.

The take

The quiet miracle of farm productivity freed up most of a household budget for everything else, the foundation of the modern consumer economy. When food stops eating your paycheque, you can buy a life.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey

Use this chart

Use this chart anywhere, including commercially, and change it if you need to. The one condition is that you credit MacroSnaps and link back to this page. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Embed it

A picture of the chart, linked back. Works anywhere, including in newsletters and Markdown. The credit line comes with it.

<a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/food-share-income">
  <img src="https://macrosnaps.app/charts/food-share-income.png" alt="How the US household budget divides, 1901 to 2024. Percent of spending. Food (bottom) has shrunk from over 40% to about an eighth as housing and health care grew." width="640" style="max-width:100%;height:auto">
</a>
<p style="font:12px/1.5 system-ui,sans-serif;color:#6b7280;max-width:640px">
  Chart: <a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/food-share-income">MacroSnaps</a>,
  <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>. Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey.
</p>

Cite it

Cites MacroSnaps for the chart. For the numbers themselves, cite the source below.

MacroSnaps (2026). "A century ago food ate over 40% of the American household budget; today it is barely an eighth." Edition No. 98, 17 October 2026. https://macrosnaps.app/c/food-share-income

Permanent link: https://macrosnaps.app/c/food-share-income

The underlying data

MacroSnaps drew this chart. The numbers in it are published by US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey. Their terms, not ours, govern the underlying data.