Harger: No state spends more per person on groceries than Washington. It’s more than $11,000 a year

Picture this.

You’re a mom or a dad with a young family. You’re working hard. Money is tight every month, and one of you has picked up a second job just to keep the rent paid and a roof over the kids’ heads.

You have a plan, sort of. Get a little breathing room on rent. Start setting money aside for a down payment. Stop crossing your fingers every time the car makes a new noise. That idea of moving on up gnaws at you.

Then you get to the checkout at the grocery store. Going out to eat stopped being an option a while ago. The receipt keeps getting longer and the total keeps going up. Your paycheck doesn’t.

New numbers show that squeeze is piling up here in Washington faster than almost anywhere in America.

The average Washington household spent an estimated $11,347 on groceries last year.

The average American household spent $8,019.

That gap, more than $3,300 a year, comes from a new ConsumerAffairs grocery study that ranks Washington third in the country for how much of a family’s paycheck disappears at the checkout.

No state spends more per person on groceries than we do: $4,612 a year, 44% above the national figure. And the household bill grew $430 from 2024 to 2025, the biggest jump of any state in America.

Food is the one bill nobody can skip. You can put off a new car, cancel a streaming service, and stretch the tires another winter. You can’t stop feeding your kids. When groceries climb this fast in a state that’s already this expensive, along with the power bill and the rent, the family doing everything right is the one that falls behind.

And spare me the advice to skip the latte. Washington families already cut back. We tie Alaska for the smallest share of food spending that goes to eating out.

Washington’s $99,389 median income hides the families falling behind

Washington is a high-income state, and the study accounts for that. The median household here earns $99,389. Against that, groceries take about 11.4% of income, up from about 11.2% before the pandemic. That sounds survivable.

Median means half of Washington households earn less than that.

Washington’s minimum wage is $17.13 an hour, the highest statewide rate in the country. Work full time all year and you gross about $35,600 before taxes. The average Washington grocery bill would eat nearly a third of it. That’s before rent, before gas, and before the power bill.

The price tags keep moving, too. Seattle-area grocery prices rose 4.5% over a year, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, it was 1.8%.

Why Washington groceries cost more than Oklahoma’s

In Oklahoma, groceries take 6.8% of household income, the lowest share in America.

So why are we paying so much more? Land is expensive here, and a grocery store pays for its lot and its building one cart at a time. Labor is expensive here, too. And the big names on our grocery stores trace back to just a few corporate owners. Kroger owns Fred Meyer and QFC. Albertsons owns Safeway and Haggen. The two tried to merge in 2024 before the courts blocked it.

Olympia should put a household price tag on every bill

Nobody’s going to wave a wand and roll grocery prices back to 2019. Some commodities will dip. Most prices will stay put.

Olympia deserves credit for one thing. Washington doesn’t charge sales tax on most groceries, and that helps. What Olympia can do now is stop adding to the pile without knowing it.

New taxes and fees usually get passed on to consumers. Every bill in the Legislature already comes with a fiscal note telling lawmakers what it costs state and local government. None of them tells lawmakers what it costs a family. Washington should require a household cost note: a plain estimate of what a new tax, fee, mandate, or regulation adds to a typical family’s monthly bills.

If lawmakers want to pass it anyway, more power to them. They should vote with the price tag in front of them, and so should voters.

Families who have done everything right are now asking where they can afford to live. Olympia ought to have an answer before they find one in Oklahoma City.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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