What is the Cost of Pizza?

There are approximately eighty thousand pizza restaurants in the US alone—that’s 1,600 per state! Americans consume three hundred and fifty slices of pizza every minute of every day—that’s right around a hundred acres of pizza every twenty-four hours. It’s big business—pizza, as an industry, pulls in somewhere around $45 billion dollars a year.

But how does the cost of eating out compare to the cost of making pizza at home? The average cost of a large cheese pizza in the US is right around $13.50. Let’s see if we can beat that.

Cost of Making Pizza at Home

Averaging out a few recipes we found online, a good classic dough recipe calls for 2 cups of flour, 2 ¼ teaspoons of instant yeast, 1 ½ teaspoon of sugar, ¾ of a teaspoon of salt, approximately 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and about ¾ of a cup of water.

A ten-pound bag of flour costs $4 (it’s actually a bit less, but we’ll round up). Per cup, we’re looking at a cost of $0.08—we would need sixteen cents worth of flour. A 4-ounce jar of instant yeast costs around $4.60; the 2 ¼ teaspoons we would need would set us back $0.27. Our total cost so far? Forty-three cents.

A four-pound bag of sugar costs around $1.70, so the 1 ½ teaspoons we would need would cost us less than half a cent. A 26-ounce container of salt costs right around $2; we would need about one cent worth of salt. Olive oil can be had for $4.20 per sixteen-ounce bottle, so our two tablespoons would run $0.525. We won’t count the cost of the water in the recipe, and since we’ve rounded up on everything else, we should be covered.

Since we’re comparing the cost of homemade pizza to the cost of a restaurant cheese pizza, we’ll keep it simple: tomato sauce and mozzarella. A 15-ounce can of pizza sauce costs around $1.05 and a 16-ounce block of mozzarella costs around $3.35. We would only be using about half of each, so let’s call it a combined total of $2.20 for the toppings.

That puts our homemade large pizza at a grand total cost (rounding up!) of $3.17. You could make four pizzas more cheaply at home than you could buy one at a restaurant or for home delivery! Or, even better, splurge for better ingredients or more toppings. You could really load your pizza up—even if you spent $10 on toppings, you would still be saving money.

Though it’s nice to save money, making pizza at home is more about being budget-minded. With your own wood burning pizza oven, you could cook multiple pizzas at a time to feed more guests or offer a greater variety—and be sure to please everyone.

See our full collection of portable pizza ovens and start planning your next pizza night!