Cooking at Home vs. Ordering In: What a Month of Takeout Actually Costs

A home-cooked dinner for two typically costs $6 to $10 per person in groceries. The same meal ordered through a delivery app, once you count the menu markup, delivery fee, service fee, and tip, usually lands between $22 and $30 per person. Order dinner four nights a week instead of cooking, and that gap alone runs $350 to $450 a month.

Quick answer: Ordering dinner in four nights a week instead of cooking typically costs an extra $350 to $450 a month for two people, once delivery apps' markup, fees, and tip are counted on top of the food itself.

The real cost of a delivered meal, broken down

Delivery apps mark up restaurant menu prices by roughly 10 to 20 percent before any fees are added. Then a delivery fee ($2 to $6), a service fee (often 10 to 15 percent of the order), and a tip (commonly 15 to 20 percent) stack on top. A restaurant entree priced at $16 on the menu can easily land at $27 to $30 once it actually hits your card.

Ordering for a family rather than one or two people compounds this further, since delivery and service fees are largely fixed per order, not per item. A family of four ordering four separate entrees pays the markup and fees once across the whole order, which slightly softens the per-person hit compared to ordering solo, though it's still well above the cost of cooking the same meal for four at home.

	Home-cooked (per person)	Delivered (per person)
Base cost	$6 to $10 (groceries)	$16 to $19 (marked-up menu price)
Fees	$0	$3 to $6 (delivery + service)
Tip	$0	$3 to $5
Total	$6 to $10	$22 to $30

What a month actually looks like

For a household of two eating dinner out (delivered or takeout) four nights a week at an average $25 per person, that's $200 a week, or about $850 a month, on just those four dinners. Cooking those same four dinners at home, at an average $8 per person, runs closer to $256 a month. The gap, roughly $594 a month in this example, isn't about depriving yourself of restaurant food entirely, it's about how much of it is happening on autopilot versus by choice.

Scale that same $594 monthly gap out to a year and it's about $7,128, a number that tends to land differently than the per-meal comparison does. Most people don't notice a single $27 dinner order. They do notice, or at least would if they ran the math, that the habit adds up to more than most people's annual car insurance or a meaningful chunk of a starter emergency fund.

Where cooking at home actually costs more

It's not automatic. Cooking elaborate meals with specialty ingredients you use once and toss, or grocery shopping without a plan and letting food spoil, can erase most of the savings. Food waste is the quiet budget killer on the cooking side of this comparison, the same way delivery fees are on the ordering side.

A middle-ground approach that actually sticks

Very few people sustain zero takeout. A more realistic target for most households is picking a fixed number of "ordering nights," say one or two a week, and treating them as planned, budgeted spending rather than a default fallback on a tired weeknight. That keeps the convenience without letting it quietly become the majority of your food budget.

Pick a specific number of ordering nights per week and stick to it, rather than deciding meal by meal
Batch cook one or two meals on a weekend to remove the "too tired to cook" excuse on weeknights
Keep 2 to 3 very fast home meals (15 minutes or less) in regular rotation for the nights you'd otherwise order out of exhaustion, not hunger

Groceries still need a plan of their own

None of this works if groceries are bought without a rough plan and a chunk of it ends up spoiled and thrown out, which quietly erodes the savings side of this comparison. A realistic middle ground is planning four or five specific dinners for the week before shopping, rather than buying ingredients generally and hoping a meal comes together, since unplanned grocery trips are where both overspending and food waste tend to happen together.

Frequently asked questions

Is takeout pickup cheaper than delivery? Yes, usually significantly. Skipping delivery and service fees by picking up an order yourself often saves $6 to $10 per order compared to delivery.

Does meal prepping actually save money? Generally yes, since buying in slightly larger quantities lowers the per-meal grocery cost and reduces the temptation to order out on a night nothing's ready.

What if I don't like cooking? The savings still apply even to very simple meals. A sheet pan of chicken and vegetables costs about the same per person as a bowl of pasta and takes under 30 minutes, no advanced cooking skill required.

Are grocery delivery services a middle ground? They cost more than shopping in person, usually a delivery fee plus a service fee similar in structure to restaurant delivery apps, but far less than restaurant delivery per meal, since you're still paying grocery prices for the food itself rather than restaurant markup.

What actually changes if you act on this

The gap between cooking and ordering isn't really about the food, it's about how many of those decisions happen automatically instead of on purpose. Fixing the number of ordering nights does more for the budget than any individual cheaper substitution.