The average American household puts 13 percent of its spending into food. The average Israeli household puts 18. We went to both countries' own expenditure surveys to find out what that gap means for a family of six.
The gap is about five points wide. Israeli food costs more than food almost anywhere in the developed world, an Israeli hour of work buys less of it, and a large family feels both at full strength. What follows walks that gap aisle by aisle for a family of six weighing a move.
What share of a household's spending actually goes to food in each country?
The American answer comes from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. In 2024 the average American household spent 78,535 dollars, and 10,169 of it went to food. That is 12.9 percent, behind only housing at 33.4 percent and transportation at 17.
The Israeli answer comes from the Central Bureau of Statistics household expenditure survey. In 2023 the average Israeli household spent 18,088 shekels a month, and 17.9 percent of it went to food including fruit and vegetables.
The chart below puts the two on one scale of percent of household spending. The top bar is the United States and it is cut in two: the solid part is groceries at 7.9 percent, and the paler part carrying on to 12.9 is eating out. The bottom bar is Israel at 17.9 percent, drawn in one piece because the survey does not split it. The dashed line dropped down from the American grocery figure marks where the American bar would stop if you counted only food brought home.
Notice that the Israeli bar clears the whole American bar, restaurant meals included.
One caveat before anything else, because it decides how big the gap really is. We could not confirm from the Israeli source whether the food group counts restaurant meals. If it does, the gap is five points. If it does not, the comparison is 17.9 against 7.9 and the gap more than doubles. Both edges are drawn on the chart, and we are not picking one for you.
Is the gap there because Israeli food is dear, or because Israeli households have less to spend?
Both, and the price half is the easier half to measure. OECD price comparisons put Israeli food and beverage prices 52 percent above the average of the 38 member countries, up from 38 percent two years earlier.
Each bar below is one food category. The left edge is the OECD average, so a bar's length is how far above that average an Israeli shopper pays. The darker bar in the middle of the stack is the all-food figure, sitting among the categories it summarises.
Look at which two categories run furthest to the right.
The two categories at the top of that chart are what a large family buys in volume, which is the first reason this lands harder on a household of six than on a household of two.
One caution on the 52. A United States Department of Agriculture report from October 2024 put the same comparison at 37 percent. Both describe OECD data and we could not reconcile the two vintages, so read the level as somewhere between the high thirties and the low fifties. The ranking by category is the durable part.
If prices are only half the story, what does an hour of work buy in each country?
Israel's State Comptroller did that half. In an audit of concentration in the food sector, his office divided shelf prices by average hourly pay, which turns a price into something a person can feel.
The chart has two panels, one per product. Every bar is one country, and its length is how many kilos an hour of average pay buys, read left to right. Israel is drawn in red in both panels so you can find it without reading the labels.
Compare the length of the red bar with the American one in each panel.
The audit blames market structure rather than geography. Of 38 food categories examined in October 2023, 36 were concentrated above half the market, and in 20 of them a single company held more than half of all sales. Cottage cheese was 100 percent, ketchup 99, pasta 72. The Comptroller's own summary of where this leaves the shopper is that Israeli purchasing power for food ran 30.2 percent below the OECD average.
One Israeli work hour buys 2.0 kg of tuna. The same hour in America buys 5.5.State Comptroller of Israel, report 75a
Does the Israeli share depend on who you are?
It depends on two things, and they move together. Households spend more of their budget on food as they get poorer, which economists have called Engel's law since the 1850s, and they also spend more of it as they get larger. Israel obeys both.
Three bars below, one per group. The length of each is the percent of that group's spending going to food including fruit and vegetables. Printed under each group's name is its average household size and, for the two ends, its monthly spending.
Read the household sizes down the left as you read the bars across.
So the 17.9 percent average is not what most Israeli households experience. It is the midpoint of a spread running from a seventh of the budget to nearly a quarter, and where a household sits on that spread is decided by its income and the number of people at its table.
So where does a family of six actually land?
Take the family from our July basket piece: two parents and four children. The Department of Agriculture publishes what feeding a household costs at four levels of thrift, and the moderate plan is the second-dearest, built on the assumption that every meal is cooked at home.
Their month prints out like a register tape. Each line below is one member of the household and what the moderate plan allows for that person, sorted the way a receipt sorts things, dearest first. The subtotal adds the six, and the line after it takes off the five percent the Department subtracts for households of this size.
That is about 22,025 dollars a year, every dollar of it food eaten at home. Set it against the average American household's grocery bill of 519 dollars a month and this family is buying three and a half times as much before anyone mentions kashrut.
Now put the same family on the Israeli chart from the aisle before. Six people is well past the 4.3 of the poorest Israeli tenth, and a shekel income in the first years after aliyah is unlikely to reach the richest. Both of the things that drive the Israeli food share upward move the wrong way at once, which makes a fifth of the household budget a planning floor rather than a bad case.
So: move to Israel, and what share of your money goes to food?
About five points more, and more than that for a large family. The table below is every comparison in this piece in one place, so you can see which numbers sit on the same basis and which do not.
| Measure | United States | Israel |
|---|---|---|
| Food, share of household spending | 12.9 percent | 17.9 percent |
| Groceries alone | 7.9 percent | Not published separately |
| Housing, share of household spending | 33.4 percent | 25.3 percent |
| A kilo of pasta per hour of average pay | 9.9 kg | 6.5 kg |
| A kilo of tuna per hour of average pay | 5.5 kg | 2.0 kg |
| Food share, poorest tenth of households | Not published on this basis | 23 percent |
| What a family of six should plan for | $1,835 a month, food at home | More than a fifth of the budget |
Read the whole table and food is not the line that decides an aliyah. Housing takes 33.4 percent of American household spending and 25.3 percent of Israeli, a gap of eight points running the other way and larger than the food gap. A family that gives up five points at the supermarket and takes back eight on the roof over its head is ahead on the arithmetic, and that is a different essay in this series.
What the food number tells you is where the pressure sits day to day. A grocery bill is paid every week, it cannot be refinanced, and it grows with every child. The Israeli version of it is larger, less responsive to how carefully you shop, and heaviest on exactly the households most likely to be packing.
The two headline shares come from each country's own household expenditure survey rather than from a single international table, which makes them current and locally accurate and also means they were not built to be compared with each other. Three differences matter. The American survey reports annual spending per consumer unit and the Israeli one reports monthly spending per household, a presentational difference rather than a real one. The American food figure separates groceries from restaurants and the Israeli one does not, and we could not establish from the source whether the Israeli food group includes meals eaten outside the home, which is why the first chart shows both American lines. And the surveys cover different years, 2024 for the United States and the 2023 survey for Israel.
The category comparisons carry their own caveats. American housing in this survey bundles utilities and household operations while the Israeli category separates them, so the eight point housing gap in the table is a maximum rather than a settled figure and is worth its own piece. The 52 percent price gap and the 37 percent one both claim OECD data and we could not reconcile them. The decile figures rest on 2018 survey data analysed by the Knesset Research and Information Center in 2021, so they are older than the headline share and are shown as the shape of the relationship rather than as current levels.
The family of six is a construction, not an observation. We built it from the USDA moderate-cost plan using two adults aged 19 to 50 and four children aged 4 to 13, applied the Department's own five percent adjustment for households of five or six, and added nothing for kashrut. Our July piece found that certified staples bought at a mainstream American supermarket cost an observant family the same as anyone else, and that the kosher premium on a comparison basket falls almost entirely on meat, so the honest way to read 1,835 dollars is as a floor for a family this size in either community. No equivalent Israeli food plan exists, which is why the Israeli half of that comparison is expressed as a share of the budget rather than in shekels.
Sources: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures 2024 · Times of Israel on the OECD price comparison, 2 July 2024 · State Comptroller of Israel, The State's Handling of Concentration and Monopolies in the Food and Consumer Products Sector, November 2024 · Knesset Research and Information Center, Analysis of Household Income and Expenditure by Decile, July 2021 · Bizportal on the CBS Household Expenditure Survey 2023 · USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Israel Retail Foods, 4 October 2024 · USDA Official Food Plans, June 2026 · Ḥeshbon, The Cost of Keeping Kosher, July 2026.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.