Tracking My Daily Food Expenditure in Singapore for a Month
After years of glancing at my monthly credit card statements and shaking my head at how much disappears into meals and snacks, I finally committed to logging every dollar I spent on food for thirty-one consecutive days in Singapore. The experiment grew out of a broader habit I picked up while recording CPF balances and Singapore Savings Bond rates on The Financial MTC, and it forced me to confront just how much variety exists within a single hawker-centred diet. I wanted to see whether my average per-meal spend matched what locals in Tiong Bahru or Tampines would casually call "normal", or whether my weekend coffees and GrabFood splurges were quietly inflating the figure.
Because most of my readers sit in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane, I have framed the results against a comparable Australian household budget. A flat white in a Surry Hills café, a supermarket run at Woolworths, or a quick lunch in the Melbourne CBD all sit in the back of my mind whenever I tally up a chicken rice set at Amoy Street Food Centre. The comparison is not about declaring one city cheaper than the other; it is about giving you a relatable yardstick for what daily feeding actually costs in a tropical, hawker-rich city when you stop guessing and start writing everything down.
The ground rules were simple. Anything edible counted: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, drinks, restaurant splurges, supermarket hauls, and the occasional durian feast when the season opened. Gifts of food, business lunches paid by clients, and meals eaten on flights were excluded. I recorded the amount in Singapore dollars the moment I paid, photographed every receipt where possible, and transferred the running total into a spreadsheet every evening. The exercise produced roughly 280 line items, and the patterns that emerged surprised me more than the grand total.
The Baseline: What a Normal Day Looks Like
Most of my weekdays followed a rhythm that any office worker in Raffles Place would recognise. I started with a kopi and a kaya toast set at the kopitiam downstairs for about S$3.50, then grabbed a mixed rice plate or a bowl of fishball noodles around noon at a hawker centre for S$5 to S$7. Dinner was the wildcard: sometimes a simple cai png at S$4.50, sometimes a sit-down meal at a zi char stall with colleagues that pushed the day above S$18. Snacks, bottled drinks, and the occasional bak kwa slice from the MRT station rounded out the smaller charges.
To make the figures meaningful for readers used to Australian grocery runs, I converted a typical weekday into a side-by-side view that I kept referring to throughout the month. It helped me see where Singapore's food culture diverges sharply from the supermarket-and-cafe routine common in Perth or Adelaide.
| Item | Singapore (typical) | Australia (equivalent) |
|---|---|---|
| Breakfast set (kopi + kaya toast) | S$3.50 | A$8–10 (flat white + pastry in a Melbourne café) |
| Hawker lunch (mixed rice / noodles) | S$5–7 | A$13–18 (café lunch or salad bowl in Sydney CBD) |
| Dinner at zi char stall | S$12–18 per pax | A$25–35 (pub meal or mid-range restaurant) |
| Groceries per week (solo) | S$60–80 | A$80–110 (Woolworths/Coles basket) |
| Durian (1 kg, season peak) | S$15–25 | A$30–50 (exotic fruit at Queen Victoria Market) |
The biggest structural difference is what you do not see in Australia. GST adds ten per cent to almost every food purchase in Sydney or Brisbane, whereas Singapore's GST rose to nine per cent in 2024 and will climb further, but hawker stall meals often escape the full surcharge because of how they are accounted. The price gap at the lower end of the market is therefore wider than the headline conversion rate suggests, which matters a lot when you are running a household on a tight envelope.
Breakfasts and the Kopitiam Economy
Kopitiams deserve their own line in the ledger because they ate up roughly fifteen per cent of my monthly food spend despite each visit costing only a few dollars. A traditional breakfast of kopi, two half-boiled eggs, and toast with kaya and butter typically landed between S$3.20 and S$4.80, depending on the estate. Tiong Bahru and Joo Chiat kopitiams sat at the upper end, while heartland spots in Bedok and Sengkang came in closer to S$3.
I also noticed how quickly my spending crept upward once I started adding sides. A bowl of mee siam for S$4 on top of the toast set pushed breakfast above S$8, which is roughly what I would pay for a smashed avo toast at a Bondi brunch spot on a Saturday morning. Cumulatively, those small upgrades turned a modest routine into a S$25-a-day habit. When I looked at the figures weekly, the kopi-and-toast pattern was the cheapest anchor I had, and skipping it on gym days immediately shaved dollars off the running total.
Hawker Centres and Lunchtime Discipline
Lunch was where my discipline improved the most. Committing to a hawker centre instead of a CBD café cut my average midday bill from around S$12 to closer to S$6. A chicken rice set at Maxwell or Lau Pa Sat hovered at S$5 to S$6.50, a yong tau foo selection with drinks was S$5.50, and a nasi lemak with egg and sambal came in at S$3.80. The variety meant I never felt I was on a diet, only that I was choosing the right venue.
For Australian readers, think of hawker centres as the spiritual cousin of Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market food hall or Sydney's Friday night food trucks in Barangaroo, except the prices are anchored significantly lower. The MAS inflation reports repeatedly show hawker food as one of the categories with the most stable pricing, and my own tracking confirmed it: I did not see a single stall raise prices during the month. The savings on lunch alone freed up roughly S$150 across the period, money that I redirected into the dinner category without guilt.
Supermarket Runs at FairPrice and Cold Storage
Groceries were where the Australian comparison became most interesting, because I usually split my weekly shop between FairPrice Finest at VivoCity and a smaller Cold Storage trip for fresh produce and dairy. A typical basket included rice, eggs, chicken breast, vegetables, yoghurt, oats, milk, fruit, and the occasional pack of prawns. The weekly average landed at about S$72, which felt reasonable until I converted it to Australian dollars and compared it with a similar Woolworths shop in Parramatta or Chatswood.
Cold Storage products imported from Australia and New Zealand, such as Mainland butter or Tamar Valley yoghurt, often cost noticeably more than the same items in Sydney, because of freight and the smaller scale of demand. Conversely, local produce like bok choy, kang kong, and local eggs were substantially cheaper than their Australian equivalents. The grocery line in my budget therefore behaved like a mirror: imported luxuries were inflated, while the staples that locals actually eat were bargains. I documented the weekly breakdown in the same spreadsheet I use for SSB vs fixed deposit comparison notes, since both activities are about watching small, regular amounts compound into something meaningful.
Restaurants, Cafés, and the Dinner Splurge Zone
Dinner was by far the most volatile category. Weekday dinners at zi char stalls or neighbourhood eateries sat between S$8 and S$15 when eating alone, but the moment I joined friends at a sit-down place, the per-person figure jumped to S$28 to S$45 before drinks. One dinner at a Peranakan restaurant in East Coast cost S$62 with a glass of wine, which felt extravagant until I reminded myself that a comparable meal at a hatted restaurant in Melbourne would have started at A$120.
I ate out socially on average three evenings a week, which is roughly in line with what a thirty-something professional in Brisbane or Adelaide would do, and the rest of the time I cooked simple dinners at home: pasta, fried rice, or grilled fish with vegetables. Home dinners cost about S$4 to S$6 per portion, including the electricity and gas used to cook them, and they gave my daily averages a welcome floor. Without them, my monthly total would have been around S$450 higher, which is the kind of figure that turns a careful budget into a careless one.
Snacks, Drinks, and the Hidden Leaks
The category I underestimated most was snacks and drinks. Bubble tea, which I usually bought twice a week at S$4.50 to S$5.50 a cup, added about S$40 to the month. Bottled teh from convenience stores on hot afternoons, packets of crisps at Cheers, and the occasional slice of cake at a Tampines café quietly accumulated into another S$90. By the end of the month, drinks and snacks alone totalled S$215, or roughly nine per cent of my entire food spend.
For Australians used to a daily coffee at A$5 and a mid-morning snack at the office pantry, this will sound familiar. The behavioural trap is the same in both countries: low unit price, high frequency. The fix is also similar. I capped my bubble tea to once a week starting in week three, switched to tap water during the day, and cut the snack line by more than a third. None of these changes required willpower on the level of a No-Buy January, just a little honesty about how often I was rewarding myself for no particular reason.
Monthly Totals and What the Numbers Reveal
When I closed the spreadsheet on day thirty-one, the grand total came to S$2,386, or roughly S$77 a day including everything. That figure felt high until I broke it into its real components: S$1,140 on groceries and home cooking, S$620 on hawker meals, S$410 on restaurant dinners and social outings, S$215 on snacks and drinks, and S$1 left as an unallocated rounding buffer. In Australian dollars, the equivalent spend would be around A$2,720, which is on the higher end of what a single person in a capital city would budget, but not unreasonable when you factor in regular social dinners.
The lesson was not that Singapore is expensive or cheap. It was that small, repeated choices, especially around drinks and impulse snacks, moved my monthly total by nearly ten per cent. Anyone reading this who keeps a similar spreadsheet, whether for CPF, SSB, or just a household ledger, will recognise that the same principle applies everywhere: the small leaks matter more than the headline splurges. If you are starting your own food tracking journey, pick a thirty-day window, fix a simple category list, and let the numbers tell you where the real waste is hiding before you decide to overhaul anything.