Which supermarket has the cheapest groceries?

After two years of surveying supermarket prices, we’ve seen some clear trends emerge.

Aldi has had the cheapest overall basket each quarter, though individual product prices can be cheaper at Coles, IGA and Woolworths, especially when specials and discounts are applied.

Woolworths and Coles are incredibly closely matched on price.

And the inconsistency between the independently run IGA stores means that while overall they’re generally more expensive on average than the other three supermarkets, your local IGA may compare favourably. 

All of this means that the advice we’ve been offering since our very first quarterly report remains as relevant now as it was in June 2024: to get the best deal, use unit pricing to compare similar products, shop around to take advantage of discounts at different supermarkets, and don’t get stuck in a routine, but instead look for alternative products that can help you save.

On this page:

• The cheapest supermarket in our survey
• Base item prices
• Prices for school lunch items
• What’s in our basket?
• How closely matched are Coles and Woolies?
• How does IGA compare
• Changes in the past 12 months
• Does where you live make a difference to grocery prices?
• Freshness assessment
• What our results mean for consumers
• How we survey supermarkets

The cheapest supermarket in our survey

Without including specials, our full basket of 17 items cost $75.98 at Aldi, $90.08 at Woolworths, $90.90 at Coles and $101.84 at IGA.

It’s important to note that in order to compare the same products as often as we can, the baskets from Coles, Woolworths and IGA contain more name-brand products than the Aldi basket. 

Prices with specials

When you take into account the savings from the specials available when we shopped, at Aldi our basket cost $75.98. It cost $89.08 at Woolworths, $90.09 at Coles and $99.10 at IGA.

During our fieldwork, Coles had a special on the Sunbeam sultanas 6-pack, and Woolies had a special on the Bega cheese slices. IGA had specials on ham, bread, yoghurt pouches, tuna, cheese slices, breast fillets and milk, but these varied from store to store.   

Base item prices

In our base basket of seven items, which contains apples, bananas, strawberries, carrots, Weetbix, milk, and chicken breast fillets, and without including specials, Aldi was cheapest at $34.03, followed by Woolworths ($35.37), Coles ($35.73) and IGA ($42.65). 

Looking at the individual items on our base basket list (without specials), Aldi had the best price on all seven items, though in some cases only by a few cents. For example, a 375g box of Weetbix from Aldi cost $3.99 and the same product was $4.00 at Coles and Woolworths and $4.11 at IGA. Nevertheless, those small differences do add up. 

When we look at those same seven items with specials included, the picture remains the same, with Aldi still the cheapest for each product. 

Prices for school lunchbox items

If you’re packing a lunch for your kids for school each day, our spotlight basket of 10 items, which this quarter focused on items you might buy to fill a lunchbox, was cheapest at Aldi, costing $41.96. This basket contained five home-brand and five name-brand products.

If you’re more interested in just the name-brand items from the other three supermarkets, we found that without taking specials into account, you’ll pay $54.71 at Woolworths and just $0.46 more at Coles ($55.17), showing once again how closely matched the big two are on most prices. At IGA, you’ll pay $59.19 for the same 10 items on average. 

When we include the special prices available at the time of our survey, the price at Aldi remains the same but changes slightly at Woolworths, Coles and IGA, where we paid $53.71, $54.36 and $56.72, respectively. 

While most prices at Aldi, Coles and Woolworths were fairly consistent around the country, the variation in pricing at IGA means the average cost of our basket of goods was higher than at the other three stores. While this is an accurate reflection of the data, you may find prices at your local IGA to be closer to what you’ll pay at other supermarkets, such is the significance of the variation between prices at different IGA stores.

What’s in our basket?

In this quarter, our basket included six fresh and 11 packaged items. The products we purchased were:

• Chicken breasts, bulk pack
• Carrots
• Royal Gala apples
• Cavendish bananas
• Strawberries
• Baby cucumbers
• Blueberries
• Full cream milk
• Yoghurt pouches 
• Cheese slices
• Ham
• Weetbix
• Vegemite
• Sultana 6-pack
• Wholemeal sandwich bread
• Multipack chips
• Canned tuna

For all items we chose, we considered a range of factors such as ingredients, country of origin and packaging similarities to ensure we made fair comparisons. When items were unavailable, we looked for the closest alternative, just as you would when shopping for your family. Fieldworkers priced groceries at 104 supermarkets in 27 locations across Australia in December 2025.

You can see the full list of the exact items purchased at each store by clicking on the blue arrow below.

Store by store lists

How closely matched are Coles and Woolies?

In the first eight quarters of our ongoing quarterly supermarket research, Coles and Woolies have remained similarly matched on price. While Woolworths was cheaper when we shopped in March 2024 and September and December 2025, Coles was the cheaper of the two in June, September and December 2024 and June 2025. 

This close contest is reflected in the total basket costs we saw in our latest survey. Without specials Woolies was $0.82 cheaper than Coles in our basket of 17 items. That difference increased only very slightly to $1.01 when comparing prices with specials. 

Eight of the items in our full basket of 17 items were priced identically at the two supermarkets. 

How does IGA compare?

IGA stores don’t have the same chain-store model as Aldi, Coles and Woolworths, with individual stores operating as independently owned franchises. That means we see quite a lot of variation between the stores in the IGA network, often due to variation in store sizes and the effect this has on the ranges.

All of this means that while some IGA stores might be more competitive, overall our basket of 17 items (without specials) cost just over $10 more on average from IGA than the same basket of goods cost us at Woolworths.

Changes in the past 12 months

Our base basket of seven items contains chicken breast fillets, carrots, Royal Gala apples, Cavendish bananas, strawberries, Weetbix and full cream milk. We’ve been surveying the price of these products since the start of our second year of quarterly surveys in June 2025.

Overall, the cost of our seven base items has fallen since last quarter. Strawberries, as would be expected for seasonal produce, fell the most, and the cost of milk rose at all four supermarkets.

The biggest total reduction was seen at Woolworths, where the price of our basket dropped by 16%. At Aldi, it fell by 11%, at Coles it dropped by 6% and at IGA the cost was 4% lower compared to the last time we shopped.

Most of the reduction in prices was due to the average 57% decrease in the cost of strawberries. Woolworths also had a large reduction in the cost of breast fillets, as they were on special (21%). Milk rose on average 6% and the price of bananas fell at all stores except IGA, where they rose by 18%.

Does where you live make a difference to grocery prices?

Our analysis found that the state you live in does make a difference to how much you pay, and we also see variations between the different stores. 

The prices varied very little between Aldi stores, although South Australian customers paid slightly more than customers in other states. ACT had the cheapest Aldi basket, followed by NSW, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia. The difference was only $0.87 between the cheapest and most expensive Aldi baskets across the country. 

Western Australians paid less at Coles than shoppers from other states. For IGA shoppers, Victoria had the best prices, and at Woolworths, ACT residents paid less than those in other parts of the country. Aldi’s ACT shoppers also got the best price. 

Proving once again how much variation exists between IGA stores, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive baskets by state for this chain was over $15; it cost $92.50 in Victoria versus $107.60 in the Northern Territory.

At Coles the variation was just $2.33 (Queensland vs Western Australia) and at Woolies it was $2.95 (Tasmania vs ACT).

Freshness assessment

One concern we often hear is that buying cheaper means getting poorer quality, and frequently, fresh fruit and vegetables are cited as being of a better quality and lasting longer at one supermarket or another. 

So, which supermarket really has the freshest produce? While we can’t answer that question for every item you might wish to purchase, in this quarter’s survey, we asked our mystery shoppers to look at a product that often shows signs of decay more quickly than we would want: strawberries.

Our first freshness survey in June 2025 also looked at strawberries. At the time, Coles had the best result in our assessment, followed by Woolworths and Aldi, with IGA earning the poorest scores.    

As with the previous survey, we asked shoppers to assess the freshness of the strawberries they bought on day one and then again on the fifth day after purchase. Shoppers were instructed to store their punnet of strawberries in the container they were bought in, and to keep them in the crisper section of their refrigerator. After five days, they were asked to examine the berries and tell us how many showed signs of decay. 

In this assessment, Coles once again beat the other supermarkets for its initial results. On day one, 91% of the Coles punnets assessed were found to contain no fruit with signs of decay.

Woolworths came in next with 87%, followed by Aldi (80%) and IGA (61%).

After five days, Woolworths led for freshness: 35% of punnets contained no fruit with signs of decay. Coles followed, with 23% of punnets showing no signs of decay.

Only 15% of punnets purchased at Aldi and 9% of those bought at IGA had no signs of decay after five days.

Aldi had the highest number of punnets (20%) that were assessed to have no remaining fresh strawberries after five days.

What our results mean for consumers

Our shopping baskets provide a general picture of prices in the different stores and locations we visit, but they can’t reveal the whole picture. 

Smaller ranges, as we saw at some IGA stores, and special pricing can make a big difference to overall costs. We also know that between the time we survey and the time we publish our results, prices will inevitably fluctuate.

What our findings continue to highlight is that small changes add up to significant savings, particularly over the course of the year. 

That doesn’t only mean changing the store you shop at. We also recommend you think creatively and carefully about what you choose to put in your shopping trolley. 

There are lots of ways to save money on your weekly shop. Here are three of our top tips to help you reduce what you’re paying at the checkout. 

1. Check the unit pricing: It can be hard to compare prices of different-sized products from different brands, but unit pricing lets you compare prices based on the price per unit e.g. 100g or 1L. All supermarkets are required by law to include this information in labelling, both online and instore.
2. Shop around: Switching between stores and shopping at different supermarkets to take advantage of specials can deliver significant savings. 
3. Change your routine: Swap expensive cuts of meat for cheaper alternatives, look at frozen fruit and veg, particularly if shopping for produce out of season, and give the ugly or imperfect fruit and veg on special a go. Also, don’t be afraid to try home-brand products. Our expert testing often finds these ranges outperform more expensive options at all the supermarkets. 

It won’t change the fact that we are still paying significantly more for our groceries than we were just a few years ago, but making these small changes can add up.

How we survey supermarkets

Supermarkets and locations

We sent undercover shoppers into 104 supermarkets – 27 Woolworths, 27 Coles, 23 Aldi and 27 IGA stores – in 27 locations across Australia in December 2025.

Supermarket locations were chosen to give good coverage of socio-economic status based on ABS Indexes and geographic spread across the country. We survey supermarkets in clusters so that each store has local competition, and we calculate the average price of the basket of goods, both with and without specials.

A price was deemed to be a special when we had evidence of a temporary price reduction. There were 17 grocery items in each basket (6 fresh and 11 packaged items).

For more details on how we survey, see How we survey supermarket grocery prices.

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Margaret Rafferty

Margaret Rafferty joined CHOICE in 2018 as a Content editor and since then has filled the roles of Commissioning editor, Managing editor and now Editorial consultant. Margaret has written on a wide variety of topics and enjoys making complex subjects easy to understand. With over 20 years of media experience, Margaret brings a strong storytelling background to CHOICE. She works closely with people across the organisation to help tell stories that make a positive difference to people and is passionate about uncovering bad practices and helping Australians to avoid falling victim to shonky products and services. Find Margaret on LinkedIn.

Margaret Rafferty joined CHOICE in 2018 as a Content editor and since then has filled the roles of Commissioning editor, Managing editor and now Editorial consultant. Margaret has written on a wide variety of topics and enjoys making complex subjects easy to understand. With over 20 years of media experience, Margaret brings a strong storytelling background to CHOICE. She works closely with people across the organisation to help tell stories that make a positive difference to people and is passionate about uncovering bad practices and helping Australians to avoid falling victim to shonky products and services. Find Margaret on LinkedIn.