Discover how much your weekly takeaways really cost — and how much you could keep in your pocket by cooking a few more meals each week. It takes about a minute, and there’s nothing to sign up for.
Prefer to read first? Could cooking at home save you over £1,000 a year?
Even replacing just one takeaway a week could save hundreds of pounds a year.
The menu price is rarely the real price. By the time you add a side, a drink, a delivery fee, a service charge and the occasional tip, a single order is far more expensive than the headline figure — often half as much again. Do that once or twice a week and it quietly becomes one of the biggest discretionary costs in the household budget.
Cooking the same dish at home flips the maths. Ingredients are cheaper per portion, there are no fees, and what you buy usually stretches across more than one meal. That gap between a takeaway and its home-cooked equivalent is exactly what this calculator measures.
Delivery and service charges are easy to ignore in the moment, but they add up relentlessly. A few pounds per order, every week, becomes a meaningful sum over a year — money spent on logistics rather than food. Add the small extras that creep into most orders, and the “convenience premium” is often larger than people realise.
This isn’t about never ordering in. It’s about seeing the trade-off clearly. A home-cooked meal that costs a few pounds in ingredients, against a takeaway that costs four or five times as much, is a difference worth knowing — especially when you only need to swap one or two meals a week to feel it. Most of the saving comes from that swap, not from giving up takeaways altogether.
If confidence is the thing holding you back, you’re not alone — and it’s the easiest barrier to clear. Start with five simple recipes you genuinely enjoy and cook them until they feel effortless. Prepare your ingredients before the pan gets hot, taste as you go, and don’t aim for perfect. Our guides to learning to cook and cooking with confidence walk you through it step by step.
For the full picture on eating well for less, see the pillar guide how to cook on a budget, and the article behind this tool, could cooking at home save you over £1,000 a year?