Price your shopping list against the whole market.
Build your typical shop from the 199 items the Office for National Statistics prices every month, the same data that makes the inflation figures, and see what it costs at the national average now against a year ago, item by item. And below, an honest answer to the question everyone asks: which supermarket is cheapest, and why nobody can lawfully tell you live.
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Which supermarket is cheapest? The honest answer.
Nobody lawfully publishes live item prices per supermarket chain, and the reason is contractual, not technical.
The official data is gagged
The ONS now holds till level scanner data covering around half the grocery market, but its agreements with the retailers forbid naming them. Its own words: publication of shop level averages is not possible for disclosure reasons, and an average price will only be published when it has contributions from all scanner retailers and local collection data.
Who does compare, and on what terms
Which? runs the best known monthly comparison, eight supermarkets and a tracked trolley of items, built on a commercial price feed and fieldworkers. Its terms allow personal use only and forbid republication, so its winner cannot lawfully appear here. Trolley.co.uk tracks prices shown by the supermarkets' own online stores. It is a private service with no open licence.
What this site will and will not do
When this site carries per chain prices it will be through a licensed feed, named on the page, with the method published. Until then this page compares your basket against the whole market average, which no chain comparison gives you, and never guesses at a winner.
The biggest movers in a year
National averages, July 2025 to July 2026. Rises first.
| Item | Then | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fish - fresh cod 1000 g | £19.77 | £24.81 | +25.5% |
| Fruit - frozen 500 g | £2.58 | £3.20 | +24.0% |
| Fish - breaded or battered (e.g. fingers and goujons) 300 g | £2.74 | £3.09 | +12.8% |
| Fish - breaded or battered (whole fish) 500 g | £5.57 | £6.27 | +12.6% |
| Cucumber each | £0.94 | £1.04 | +10.6% |
| Courgette 1000 g | £2.86 | £3.16 | +10.5% |
| Water - flavoured 1200 ml | £0.99 | £1.09 | +10.1% |
| Canned meat 400 g | £3.37 | £3.71 | +10.1% |
And the biggest falls
| Item | Then | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honey 400 g | £2.49 | £2.14 | -14.1% |
| Pizza 450 g | £4.09 | £3.70 | -9.5% |
| Pork - bacon (e.g. joint, rasher) 1000 g | £9.26 | £8.59 | -7.2% |
| Pork - gammon (e.g. joint, rasher) 1000 g | £9.61 | £8.92 | -7.2% |
| Milk - flavoured 350 ml | £1.23 | £1.15 | -6.5% |
| Pears 1000 g | £2.59 | £2.44 | -5.8% |
| Plums 1000 g | £3.90 | £3.68 | -5.6% |
| Beer - lager 5000 ml | £14.83 | £14.02 | -5.5% |
Where this comes from, and where it could be wrong
Parsed twice by independent means from two separate ONS published files, the spreadsheet behind its shopping prices tool and the machine readable CSV of the same series, with the two parses compared item by item. All 199 items, both months and every unit agreed exactly, so all 199 are here. Prices are stored in pence.
Ways this page could mislead you
These are national averages of what was actually charged across the UK, blending collected shelf prices with till data. Your shop will differ, in both directions, and a loyalty card price can sit well below the average.
Units are the ONS standard quantity for each item, not any particular pack on a shelf. The milk figure is per 1136ml because that is two pints.
Six items joined the basket after July 2025, so they have no year ago figure and say so rather than showing an invented one.
July 2026 is the latest month. The ONS refreshes this with each monthly inflation release, about six weeks behind the month it describes.
An average moving says the market moved. It does not say your supermarket moved by that amount.
Sources
30 price changes logged. Every one had a date you could have known in advance.
Tell us which bills you care about and we will email you when one of them changes, with the figure, the date it starts and a link to the regulator that set it. Free, no account, one click to stop.
Email alerts are not running yet. We would rather say that than take your address and send you nothing. Until they are, the change log carries every dated change the day we find it, and you can bookmark it or follow it in a reader.