American households are now devoting nearly half of their total spending to two line items: a roof over their heads and food on the table. New federal data shows housing and food combined accounted for the largest share of U.S. household spending in 15 years during 2025, with households spending $1,988 more on those two categories alone than they did just a year earlier.
The figures come from Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Bloomberg, which reported that housing and food made up nearly half of U.S. households' spending in 2025 — the most in a decade and a half. Rising rents, climbing homeowner costs and pricier beef all helped push the combined total higher, according to the same report.
Housing Alone Claims a Third of Every Budget
Housing accounted for 33.9% of total household expenditures, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That housing share was the highest since 2010 when excluding the 2020 spike that followed the onset of COVID-19. Food, meanwhile, has been climbing since 2020 and reached 13% of household spending, its highest level since 2011.
Those two categories — which include rent, utilities and household furniture — were also the only major spending categories with statistically significant increases in 2025. Everything else households spend money on held comparatively steady by that measure.
Grocery Bills Climb as Beef Gets Pricier
On the food side, grocery costs have been a persistent squeeze. The USDA's Economic Research Service found that average annual food-at-home prices were 2.3% higher in 2025 than in 2024. That followed a period of sharper swings: food-price increases peaked near 10% in 2022 before tapering to 5.8% in 2023 and 2.3% in 2024, according to separate USDA chart data.
Bloomberg's reporting ties part of this year's pressure to geopolitics, noting that the Iran war sent some grocery prices and utility costs surging in 2026. Combined with already-elevated beef prices cited in the same report, the pattern has kept grocery bills a persistent source of household strain even as broader food inflation has cooled from its 2022 peak.
A Decade and a Half Without This Much Strain
Taken together, the trend lines paint a picture of households absorbing cost increases on two fronts simultaneously rather than one. Housing and food's combined share of spending reaching its highest level in 15 years suggests the squeeze isn't confined to a single volatile category like gas prices or travel — it's baked into the most basic necessities, shelter and groceries, that families can least avoid.
The dossier of federal data reviewed does not include local or regional breakdowns, so it remains unclear how sharply any single city or state has felt this shift compared with the national average. What is clear from the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures is that the combined weight of housing and food on the average household budget hasn't been this heavy since before 2010.
