Americans Who Cook Spend 64 Minutes a Day in the Kitchen. The Famous '37 Minutes' Counts the People Who Don't.

The most-quoted number about American home cooking is that the average American spends 37 minutes a day on it. The number is real, and it is a decade old, and it counts millions of people who never touched a stove that day. When the Cambom Kitchen Team recomputed the figures from the government’s own published time-use tables for the Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026), the same survey said something different: Americans who actually cooked or cleaned up spent 64 minutes a day at it in 2024, and averaged over everyone the figure is 40 minutes, not 37. Sixty-four minutes a day is about 7.4 hours a week, nearly a full workday spent at the counter and the sink. Our thesis: the internet’s favorite cooking statistic is a denominator artifact, the real story of the last decade is that more Americans cook, not that cooks cook longer, and the two other viral cooking stats trace back to origins that cannot support them.

Key findings

Each line below is a complete, sourced statistic. Copy them freely; see how to cite this page.

• Americans who did any food preparation or cleanup in 2024 averaged 64 minutes a day at it, versus 40 minutes averaged across everyone, per the Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026) of BLS American Time Use Survey Table A-1.¹
• 63.1% of Americans age 15+ did food prep or cleanup on an average day in 2024, up from 56.3% in 2014 (BLS ATUS).^1,2
• The Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026) found the decade’s growth came almost entirely from participation: daily cooks rose 6.8 percentage points from 2014 to 2024, while time per cook rose just 1.2 minutes, from 62.4 to 63.6.^1,2
• The share of US men cooking on a given day jumped from 36% in 2003 to 52% in 2023 (Ewoldt et al., peer-reviewed ATUS analysis of 231,657 diaries, 2025).¹¹
• Women who cook averaged 71 minutes a day in 2003 and 71 minutes in 2023, flat across two decades (Ewoldt et al., 2025).¹¹
• Food away from home took 58.5% of total US food spending in 2023, the highest share on record, and has exceeded grocery spending every year since 2010 (USDA Economic Research Service).^7,8
• US eating-out spending reached $1.41 trillion in 2025 versus $1.10 trillion for groceries, a $310 billion gap computed by Cambom (July 2026) from the USDA ERS Food Expenditure Series.⁸
• The average US household spent $6,224 on food at home in 2024, about $120 a week, versus $3,945 eating out (BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey).²³
• Grocery prices rose 2.7% in the 12 months ending June 2026 versus 3.4% for restaurant prices (BLS CPI), a 0.7-point cost edge for cooking at home computed by Cambom in July 2026.²¹
• The “90% of Americans don’t like to cook” statistic appears in no survey: 2017 news coverage summed a consultant’s unpublished 45% “hate it” and 45% “lukewarm” categories, per the Cambom Cooking Time Audit’s origin trace (July 2026).^19,20

The 37-minute statistic is a denominator artifact, and the government’s own table proves it

Start with where 37 minutes actually comes from. On an average day in 2014, Americans age 18 and over spent 37 minutes on food preparation, serving, and cleanup, per a November 2016 USDA Economic Research Service data feature built on the American Time Use Survey’s Eating and Health Module.⁵ Recipe blogs re-quote it to this day as “time spent cooking dinner.” It was never that. It is an average over all adults, including the large share who did no food prep at all that day, and it bundles serving and washing up with cooking.

The same 2016 ERS feature contains its own rebuttal, one paragraph down: among adults who identified as their household’s usual meal preparer, the average was 51 minutes, 38% higher.⁵ And the modern numbers are one row of one public table. BLS ATUS Table A-1 for 2024 publishes both denominators side by side: 0.67 hours a day averaged over everyone, and 1.06 hours a day among people who engaged in the activity. The Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026) converts that single row: 40.2 minutes for the all-persons average, 63.6 minutes for the people who actually cooked, a 23-minute gap inside the same survey year.¹ The newest release, 2025 annual averages published in June 2026, moves the all-persons figure to 42.6 minutes.³

The takeaway: any “minutes per day” cooking statistic is meaningless until you ask who is in the denominator. Same agency, same year, same table: 40 minutes or 64 minutes.

America cooks more than a decade ago, but only because more Americans cook

The 10-year trend hides its own structure. Averaged over everyone, food-prep time rose from 35.4 minutes a day in 2014 to 40.2 in 2024, a 13.6% increase computed by Cambom (July 2026) from BLS Table A-1.^1,2 Decomposed, almost none of that came from longer cooking. Participation did the work: the share of Americans doing any food prep on a given day rose from 56.3% to 63.1%, while time per participant crept from 62.4 to 63.6 minutes. More people are in the kitchen; the people in the kitchen are not staying longer.

The peer-reviewed record says the same thing over a longer window. Ewoldt and colleagues analyzed 231,657 ATUS diaries from 2003 through 2023 in a 2025 study in Current Developments in Nutrition: the share of adults cooking rose, while mean time among cooks stayed essentially flat.¹¹ The composition shift is who cooks. Men’s daily cooking participation jumped from 36% in 2003 to 52% in 2023; men who cooked added five minutes, from 45 to 50 a day. Women’s participation edged from 69% to 72%, and their cooking time sat at 71 minutes in 2003 and 71 minutes in 2023.

The gender gap remains the largest split in the data. On an average 2024 day, 71.6% of women did food prep or cleanup versus 54.2% of men, and averaged over everyone, women logged 51.6 minutes to men’s 27.6, a 1.87x ratio computed by Cambom (July 2026) from the same BLS table.¹ Two decades of change added men to the kitchen without subtracting minutes from women.

How often America cooks dinner depends entirely on who is asking

Cooking frequency is the most contested number in the niche, so the Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026) collected the named trackers side by side rather than picking a favorite:

The spread is not noise; it is instrumentation. The government-grade NHANES figure counts household dinners, so it reads high for any one person. The 2025 QuestionPro mean of 3.6 sessions a week sits 28% below the NHANES-era mean, a gap Cambom computed in July 2026, but “cooking sessions” and “household dinners” are different questions. The modal American cook moved from “always” in 2007-2008 government data to “3 to 4 nights a week” in the 2020-2022 panels, or the panels simply ask differently. Range honesty beats false precision: the defensible 2026 claim is that most Americans cook dinner at home 3 or more nights a week, and no single tracker deserves the definite article.

One null result worth stating plainly: we found no credible evidence of a home-cooking collapse. Every federal measure in this audit moved up or held flat over the decade. The “nobody cooks anymore” narrative has no row in this table.

Three famous cooking statistics trace to origins that cannot support them

The kitchen niche runs on zombie statistics. The Cambom Cooking Time Audit (July 2026) traced the three biggest to their primary documents.

“Americans spend 37 minutes a day cooking.” Real number, wrong meaning. As shown above, it is the 2014 all-persons average for prep, serving, and cleanup combined. The same ERS source puts usual meal preparers at 51 minutes, and the 2024 participants-only figure is 64 minutes. Quoting 37 as “time spent cooking” understates the people who cook by roughly a third.

“The average American spends 53 minutes cooking dinner every night.” The real origin is a January 2024 BLS Economics Daily note on 2022 data: people who prepared any food or drink that day averaged 53 minutes at it across the whole day, and only 57.2% of Americans did any at all.⁴ The viral rendering commits three distortions at once, per the audit’s comparison: participants become “the average American,” all-day prep becomes “dinner,” and an average day becomes “every night.”

“90% of Americans don’t like to cook” and its cousin “only 10% love cooking.” The trail ends at a September 2017 Harvard Business Review essay by a consultant, Eddie Yoon,¹⁹ describing two of his own unpublished client surveys: one from around 2002 (15% love, 50% hate, 35% ambivalent) and one from around 2016-17 (10% love, 45% hate, 45% lukewarm). No sample sizes, no methodology, no fieldwork dates were ever published. The essay never says 90%; that figure was coined the same week by personal-finance coverage²⁰ that added “hate it” to “lukewarm.” The HBR headline performed its own upgrade, turning “consumers” from two private client studies into “Americans.” A number that reaches print without a survey behind it is not a statistic; it is a caption.

The money flipped fifteen years before the culture noticed

Whatever the surveys say about habits, the dollars have already voted. Food away from home first caught grocery spending in 2007, dipped during the 2008-09 recession, and has exceeded it every year since 2010, per USDA ERS’s revised Food Expenditure Series.^8,10 By 2023 the eating-out share hit 58.5% of total food spending, the highest since the series began in the 1930s, inside a record $2.57 trillion total. In the inflation-adjusted series, 2025 closed at $1.41 trillion for eating out against $1.10 trillion for groceries; Cambom’s subtraction (July 2026) puts the gap at $310 billion, with eating-out spending about 28% larger.

Two caveats keep the number honest. First, the dollar share is not a food share: a restaurant dollar buys fewer calories than a grocery dollar, so groceries still supply most of what Americans actually eat. Second, the income view is nearly balanced: in 2025, eating out took 4.9% of disposable personal income and food at home took 4.8%, per ERS,⁹ with the overall food share at 9.7% and down from 10.4% in 1997.

The near-term price wind favors the stove. Grocery prices rose 2.7% in the 12 months ending June 2026 against 3.4% for restaurant prices, a 0.7-point cook-at-home edge computed by Cambom (July 2026) from BLS CPI releases.^21,22 The household ledger makes the stakes concrete: $6,224 a year on food at home in 2024, roughly $120 a week and 7.9% of total household spending per Cambom’s arithmetic on the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey,²³ next to $3,945 eating out, plus a per-capita eating-out bill that jumped 12% to $4,485 in 2023 per ERS. Every percentage point of restaurant inflation is an argument for the cutting board.

The tools market already trades on the shift, even where its own numbers disagree

The corporate filings read like a bet on home cooking. SharkNinja’s Form 10-K for fiscal 2025²⁴ reports company net sales up 15.7% to $6.4 billion, with its Food Preparation Appliances segment up 31.6% to $1.55 billion, twice the company-wide rate; the filing credits much of that segment jump to one hot sub-category, frozen-drink appliances, which is exactly the kind of caveat marketing decks omit and filed financials cannot.

The market-sizing industry, meanwhile, disagrees with itself by multiples. For the same US small kitchen appliances market in the same year, 2025, Mordor Intelligence publishes $11.64 billion while Expert Market Research publishes $31.90 billion^25,26, a 2.74x spread computed by Cambom in July 2026; Fortune Business Insights projects a broader “small domestic appliances” figure of $56.21 billion by 2026²⁷ that includes non-kitchen products. When named firms differ by 174% on the same market and year, the honest citation is the range, not the midpoint.

At the checkout level, the Cambom Kitchen Tools Price Index, the median of 28 kitchen prep tools Cambom tracks daily on Amazon, stood at $28.48 on 2026-07-22 (mean $30.19, range $9.99 to $99.99; 25 of 28 under $40). Set against the $120-a-week grocery budget above, the median manual prep tool costs less than two days of the average household’s grocery spending.

The honest counterweight

Two findings cut against the tidy story, and one caveat applies to us. First, the null result: there is no cooking-time renaissance in the minutes. Time per cook moved 1.2 minutes in a decade and women’s cooking time has been flat for twenty years; anyone selling a “return to the kitchen” narrative is describing participation, not duration. Second, the frequency trackers genuinely conflict, and part of this article’s own audit table compares instruments that measure different things (household dinners, personal sessions, diary days); we present the spread rather than resolve it, because resolving it would require pretending the questions match. Third, our own quasi-first-party layer is narrow: the Cambom Kitchen Tools Price Index covers 28 SKUs Cambom itself selected for tracking, so it describes the manual-prep-tool shelf Cambom watches, not the housewares market; treat it as a transparent sample, not a census.

How to cite this page

Citation: Cambom, “The Cambom Cooking Time Audit,” cambom.org/blog/statistics/home-cooking-statistics (July 2026 snapshot).

The computed and audited figures on this page (the denominator recompute, the trend decomposition, the survey audit table, the spending-gap arithmetic, and the Cambom Kitchen Tools Price Index) are licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse them freely, including commercially, with attribution to Cambom. Figures credited to federal agencies, journals, or named firms belong to their producers; cite them directly. Journalists and researchers are welcome to the raw audit CSV.

Methodology and sources

The Cambom Kitchen Team compiled and verified this audit in July 2026. Every number was retrieved from its primary producer on 2026-07-22, quoted against the source document, and re-checked by a second pass; each carries its source’s own data year in-sentence. Time-use figures are recomputed from BLS ATUS Table A-1 published columns (the all-persons and per-participant denominators are different columns of the same table row). Spending figures use USDA ERS’s Food Expenditure Series, mixing vintages only where flagged. Survey-audit rows preserve each tracker’s own instrument wording; we do not average across incompatible instruments. The zombie-stat traces follow each claim to the earliest primary document that states it. The Cambom Kitchen Tools Price Index is computed from Cambom’s daily Amazon price tracking of 28 kitchen prep tools (median, July 22, 2026). This page updates as new ATUS and ERS vintages publish; the dataset version is 2026-07.

1. BLS, American Time Use Survey, Table A-1, 2024 annual averages: bls.gov/tus/tables/a1-2024.pdf
2. BLS, American Time Use Survey, Table A-1, 2014 annual averages: bls.gov/tus/tables/a1_2014.pdf
3. BLS, ATUS charts, household activities, 2025 annual averages: bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-hldh.htm
4. BLS, The Economics Daily, time spent cooking (2022 data), Jan 29, 2024: bls.gov/opub/ted/2024
5. USDA ERS, Amber Waves, "Americans Spend an Average of 37 Minutes a Day Preparing and Serving Food and Cleaning Up," Nov 2016: ers.usda.gov
6. USDA ERS, EIB-158, "Americans' Eating Patterns and Time Spent on Food," 2016: ers.usda.gov/publications/80503
7. USDA ERS, Amber Waves, FAFH spending in 2023, Oct 8, 2024: ers.usda.gov
8. USDA ERS, Food Expenditure Series chart 58364 (updated Jun 1, 2026): ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58364
9. USDA ERS, food share of disposable income, chart 76967 (updated Jun 1, 2026): ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/76967
10. USDA ERS, Amber Waves, revised food expenditure estimates (crossover dating), Nov 2018: ers.usda.gov
11. Ewoldt L, Ng SW, Popkin BM, Taillie LS, "Trends in Home Cooking among United States Adults from 2003 to 2023," Current Developments in Nutrition 9(9), 2025: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12512152
12. Virudachalam et al., cooking-frequency analysis of CDC NHANES 2007-2008, Public Health Nutrition: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10282260
13. YouGov US daily question, dinner-cooking frequency, Jan 31, 2020: yougov.com
14. HUNTER, "America Gets Cooking," Apr 2020 (via PR Newswire): prnewswire.com
15. OnePoll for Jennie-O (Hormel Foods), Mar 2022: hormelfoods.com
16. ReportLinker consumer survey, Dec 2016 (via trade press; original page offline): homebusinessmag.com
17. QuestionPro, "America's Real Eating Habits," Jun 2025: questionpro.com
18. HelloFresh, The 2025-2026 State of Home Cooking Report (Wakefield Research): hellofresh.com
19. Yoon E., Harvard Business Review, Sept 22, 2017 (headline and essay; underlying client surveys unpublished): hbr.org
20. CNBC Make It, Sept 27, 2017 (origin of the summed "90%" rendering): cnbc.com
21. BLS, Consumer Price Index news release, June 2026: bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
22. BLS, The Economics Daily, CPI year ended June 2026, Jul 17, 2026: bls.gov/opub/ted/2026
23. BLS, Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024, household food spending: bls.gov/opub/ted/2026
24. SharkNinja, Inc., Form 10-K for FY2025 (filed with the SEC Mar 2, 2026): sec.gov
25. Mordor Intelligence, Small Kitchen Appliances Market (global and US editions, 2026): mordorintelligence.com
26. Expert Market Research, United States Small Kitchen Appliances Market, 2026 edition: expertmarketresearch.com
27. Fortune Business Insights, Small Domestic Appliances Market, 2026 edition: fortunebusinessinsights.com

Compiled and verified by the Cambom Kitchen Team, July 2026. Cambom builds manual kitchen prep tools; this page cites no Cambom product as evidence, and the only Cambom-attributed figures are the computations described above.

Frequently asked questions

How much time does the average American spend cooking per day?

It depends which average you mean. Across all Americans age 15 and up, including those who did no food prep at all that day, BLS time-use data shows 40 minutes per day on food preparation and cleanup in 2024, and 43 minutes in 2025. Among people who actually cooked or cleaned up that day, the 2024 average was 64 minutes. The often-quoted 37 minutes is the all-persons figure from 2014.

What share of Americans cook at home on a given day?

In 2024, 63.1% of Americans age 15 and older did some food preparation or cleanup on an average day, per the BLS American Time Use Survey. That participation rate is up from 56.3% in 2014. Women participate more than men: 71.6% versus 54.2% on an average day in 2024.

Do Americans spend more eating out than on groceries?

In dollars, yes. Food away from home took 58.5% of total US food spending in 2023, the highest share since USDA’s records began in the 1930s, and eating-out spending has exceeded grocery spending every year since 2010. Groceries still supply most of the food actually eaten, because a restaurant dollar buys fewer calories than a grocery dollar.

Is it true that 90% of Americans hate cooking?

No survey ever found that. The figure was assembled in 2017 by news coverage that added a consultant’s two unpublished client-survey categories together: 45% who said they hate cooking plus 45% who were lukewarm. The Harvard Business Review essay behind it never states 90%, and the underlying data was never published. Federal time-use data points the other way: more Americans cook now than a decade ago.

How many times a week does the average American cook?

The honest answer is a range, because named trackers disagree. Government NHANES data (2007-2008) found an average of five home-cooked dinners per week. A January 2020 YouGov panel found 75% of adults cooking dinner at least three nights a week. A 2022 OnePoll survey put the most common answer at three to four days a week, and a June 2025 QuestionPro panel measured 3.6 cooking sessions per week. The instruments differ, and the spread itself is the finding.

Is cooking at home cheaper than eating out in 2026?

The price gap is moving in cooking’s favor. Over the 12 months ending June 2026, grocery prices rose 2.7% while restaurant prices rose 3.4%, per BLS CPI data. The average US household spent $6,224 on food at home in 2024, about $120 a week, versus $3,945 on food away from home, and eating out now takes a slightly larger share of disposable income than groceries (4.9% vs 4.8% in 2025).

If the hour a day is yours, the right tools give some of it back. A vegetable chopper compresses the dicing that eats most weeknight prep, a salad spinner turns washed greens into dressed salad in minutes, and if the safety side of that hour interests you, our companion audit of federal injury data, kitchen injury statistics, covers what actually sends cooks to the ER.