Is it cheaper to be vegan? What two US trials and this fall's prices show

On average, yes, when beans, grains and vegetables do most of the replacing. In a 16-week US trial, daily food costs fell about 16% in a group put on a low-fat vegan diet, against a smaller, non-significant dip in the control group, mostly because of the meat and dairy they stopped eating. Supplements weren’t counted.

The line in that trial you’d expect to sink the savings is meat alternatives. By week 16 the vegan group was spending $0.59 a day on them, against $0.16 at the start, close to four times as much (our arithmetic), and it was spending more on vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains and dairy alternatives too. Vegetables were the biggest new cost, up from $2.03 to $3.00 a day. The total still fell from $9.31 to $7.80 a day, a drop of $1.51 (our arithmetic), because meat had been costing the group $1.79 a day and dairy $0.88. Most of that meat money was not steak. The study files $1.29 a day of it as white meat and $0.27 as red. Meat alternatives and all, the vegan group’s food cost less. Those aren’t one product either, and our look at what vegan meat is made of compares seven of them.

What the trials measured, and where they stop

The 2023 trial enrolled 244 adults with overweight in Washington, DC, between 2017 and 2019. Half were asked to follow a low-fat vegan diet of fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes, with no limit on calories or food spending, and half were asked to change nothing. Each kept a 3-day food record at the start and at week 16, and the researchers priced those records against the national food prices in USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan. The control group’s costs dipped too, though not significantly, so the difference the trial credits to the vegan diet is $0.90 a day per person.

A second trial by the same team, run in 2019, put 62 adults with overweight on a low-fat vegan diet and a Mediterranean diet for 16 weeks each, in random order with a 4-week break between. Food costs fell 19% on the vegan diet and showed no significant change on the Mediterranean one, a gap of 25%, or $2.40 a day. Against the Mediterranean diet, the vegan one saved about $2.90 a day on meat, and spent about $0.50 a day more on each of vegetables and meat alternatives.

Both have edges. Two of the seven authors work at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and a third is its president, Neal Barnard; the 2024 paper also says the organization paid its statistician for the analysis. They list their own limits: diet records the participants filled in themselves, Thrifty Food Plan prices they call conservative, no alcohol, and volunteers who may not look like everyone else. Those prices come from a national database, so the trials can’t tell you what your own store charges.

Two other sources mostly point the same way, with their own caveats. A 2021 Oxford modelling study of 150 countries found that, depending on the diet, healthier and more sustainable patterns cost up to 22 to 34% less than current diets on average (by mean values) in upper-middle and high-income countries, with vegetarian and vegan versions generally the most affordable. In lower-middle and low-income countries, the same diets cost at least 18 to 29% more. And a survey of 24,537 people in the US, published in 2016, found that “true” vegetarians, as the authors call them, report spending less on food, partly because of what they eat and partly because of who they are. People who call themselves vegetarian but sometimes eat or buy meat reported spending more than meat eaters. The survey reports on vegetarians, not vegans.

The case that vegan costs more

When I went vegan, most vegan certified products were a bit pricey next to the non-vegan ones. My guess is that swapping each chicken breast for a branded patty and each glass of milk for an oat carton is the expensive way to do this. The trial can’t settle that, though it shows which way those lines moved, since spending on meat alternatives and on dairy alternatives both went up. The survey’s part-time vegetarians reported spending more than meat eaters did, which is a warning that a label on the shopper says little about the bill. And the Oxford model has these diets costing more than current diets in poorer countries, so cheaper is a statement about where you shop as much as what you buy.

There is also the bill the trials didn’t add up. The 2023 analysis left out supplements. If you take B12, our B12 roundup prices the options per dose, and that is a line worth putting in your own sums before you claim the savings.

What the shelf says this fall

The diet records are from 2017 to 2019, and both teams priced them with USDA’s 2021 Thrifty Food Plan. Shelf prices have moved since, and not evenly. These are the US city averages the Bureau of Labor Statistics published for September 2026:

Item	Price, September 2026
Dried beans, any type	$1.67 a lb
White rice, long grain, uncooked	$1.12 a lb
Whole chicken, fresh	$2.06 a lb
Boneless chicken breast	$4.20 a lb
Ground beef, 100% beef	$6.79 a lb
Eggs, grade A, large	$2.27 a dozen

Ground beef averaged $5.11 a pound in September 2023, so it has risen by about a third in three years (our arithmetic), while dried beans went from $1.72 to $1.67. A pound of ground beef now costs about four times a pound of dried beans (our arithmetic). A whole chicken costs only about 40 cents a pound more than the beans (our arithmetic), though the beans are weighed dry and swell in the pot. Eggs show how fast any of this changes: $3.82 a dozen in September 2024, $2.27 two years later.

Our line

Our line at Vegan Pots is that going vegan lowers US food costs on average, and that the saving comes from what leaves the plate rather than from anything magic in a lentil. Keep the substitutes as extras, the way the trial group did, and the numbers we read still come out ahead. Replace every animal product one for one with its branded double, and you are running an experiment nobody here has measured.

The part I’m least sure about is how far the trials’ prices sit from a real receipt. Both priced self-reported diets against a national database whose cost estimates the authors themselves call conservative, and nothing we read for this page follows what vegan households actually pay at the register over years. If you want the list that keeps your own bill closest to the trial’s, our vegan grocery list goes aisle by aisle.