How much should you spend on lunch?

It’s easy to spend so much on lunch that it starts to eat into your earnings, so here’s a good rule of thumb for spending on your meal.

Ah, lunch. It’s that meal in the middle of the work day, at least traditionally (and at least on weekdays). I know that people’s work days are more scattered now, both with the rise of remote work and also how more people have varying schedules.

But regardless of how you do it, you gotta eat.

If you’re one of those people who still leaves the home to go to a workplace, this one is especially for you, but no matter what, here’s something to think about.

I’m referring to the question: how much should you spend on lunch?

My first job with a long shift

I was working at a department store. My job was to bring out the TVs, VCRs, and other products that customers had purchased in the main part of the store. It wasn’t my first job, but it was my first job that had an eight hour shift.

If I were a different person, I might have made myself food and brought it with me to work and ate it there.

But I was a teenager, and such things were not only beyond me, but also not of interest.

So with my half hour of free time in my eight hour shift, I would walk down the main road to the Burger King a few blocks away, and pick up a meal. (This was way before I became a vegetarian.)

I know I’m dating myself here, but the meal was $5, which happened to be exactly the wage I was getting at the warehouse.

And there was something about that alignment that struck me, and stuck with me ever since.

Your optimal lunch price

I developed a kind of rule of thumb about lunch that I’ve carried all the way to today. The rule of thumb states:

Never pay any more for lunch than you would make in an hour of work.

Make $5 an hour? Your lunch shouldn’t cost more than $5.

Make $20 an hour? Your lunch shouldn’t cost any more than $20.

My reasoning

You don’t want to eat up too much of your salary, that’s why.

If you spend one hour’s worth of work on lunch, that’s 1/8th of your daily pay, or 12.5%.

Any more than that, and now you’re starting to have a major chunk of your earning just shoveled into the meal you have in the middle of that work day. That doesn’t make much sense.

Better to give yourself an hour’s worth. An hour’s worth on money for your lunch, and no more.

What about salary?

This works well for an hourly wage, but what about salary?

There are a few ways to calculate this, but a good rule of thumb I use is that you can roughly calculate your hourly wage from your salary by lopping off three zeroes and diving by two.

So, if you make $50,000 a year, that translates roughly to $25 an hour.

If you make $100,000 a year, that’s roughly $50 an hour.

Now, after a certain amount of salary, one might think that it’s unlikely that one would ever spend that much on lunch. But lunch prices can expand to fill the salary around them. It’s always possible to spend more on lunch.

What about bringing food from home?

What if you don’t buy lunch at all?

Feel free to sit smugly with your Tupperware container full of food, but make no mistake, you bought lunch too. You just didn’t buy it right then.

Sure, making lunch at home from groceries you bought is often cheaper (though not always), it’s not free.

And you’d be surprised how much even making food at home can cost.

Sure, it’s probably less than an hour’s wage. But you still should check, by adding up the cost of the ingredients.

Don’t eat your salary

I am 100% in favor of spending money on restaurants. I think eating out is fun and enjoyable, and I think that we’ve gone too far in the direction of seeing going out to eat as some kind of moral failing. If you enjoy something, you shouldn’t feel bad about indulging in it.

But you should also make sure your other financial bases are covered. And if you’re spending more than an hour of your eight hour work day’s wage on your lunch, you may not be prioritizing your other financial needs.

If you love what you’re doing, then keep it up. But as a rule of thumb, I’d say to keep your lunchtime spending to no more than an hour’s worth of wage.