$0.65per plate
Breakfast ideas, priced per plate
17 Easy Breakfast Ideas
17 real Budget Plates breakfasts with the cost on every plate - casseroles that feed ten, pancakes, breakfast sandwiches you can freeze, and eggs and potatoes for an ordinary weekday. The median plate here is $0.92, and 10 of them come in under a dollar.
Browse the 17 breakfasts
17breakfast recipes
$0.92median cost per serving
10under $1 a serving
8feed 8 or more
Breakfast is the cheapest meal of the day to cook and the easiest one to buy badly. These 17 recipes are the ones we actually make: a 9x13 casserole when the house is full, a batch of sandwiches in the freezer for weekday mornings, pancakes on a Saturday, and eggs and potatoes the rest of the time. Every card shows what a serving costs, and the median across the collection is $0.92 a plate. Numbered 1-17 for reference; it is a curated collection, not a ranking.
Feed everybody at once
See all recipes
Breakfast casseroles
One dish, one oven, and eight to ten people fed. These are the pans to make when the house is full, and most of them can be assembled the night before so the morning is just baking.
$0.83per plate
$0.92per plate
$1.0per plate
$1.01per plate
Sweet mornings
See all recipes
Pancakes and sweet breakfasts
The weekend end of breakfast. A baked German pancake needs one bowl and no flipping, a whole sheet pan of pancakes bakes at once with nothing to turn, and the baked oatmeal keeps all week.
$0.3per plate
$0.35per plate
$0.38per plate
$0.6per plate
$1.16per plate
Plan the whole week
Breakfast is the cheapest meal to plan
One weekend batch of sandwiches or burritos covers most of a week of mornings, and it costs a fraction of buying breakfast out. The Budget Meal Planner does the same arithmetic for dinner, with one shopping list and a running total.
Breakfast in one hand
See all recipes
Sandwiches and handheld breakfasts
Breakfast you can pick up and carry. Every one of these batches well and most freeze for a month, which is how you stop buying breakfast on the way to work.
$1.09per plate
$1.12per plate
$1.31per plate
$1.37per plate
Eggs and savory plates
See all recipes
Eggs, potatoes and savory breakfasts
The plate-fillers. Crisp roasted potatoes to put next to eggs, a pan of sausage gravy over split biscuits, and egg fried rice for when last night's rice is still in the fridge.
$0.42per plate
$0.58per plate
$0.97per plate
Making breakfast cheaper
How to use this collection
Cook once, eat all week
The cheapest breakfasts are the ones you make on a Sunday. The breakfast sandwiches and the burritos both freeze for a month and reheat in about two minutes, and the baked oatmeal keeps five days in the fridge. A single batch replaces a week of buying breakfast on the way somewhere.
Assemble the night before
Most of the casseroles here can be put together the evening before and baked in the morning. The french toast casserole actually needs the overnight soak to come out right, so the make-ahead step is not a shortcut, it is the recipe.
Eggs are the cheapest protein in the store
Most of what makes these breakfasts filling is eggs, and eggs are still the cheapest protein per gram you can buy. 10 of these 17 come in under a dollar a serving, and the cheapest is about $0.30.
Stale bread is an ingredient, not waste
Two of these recipes are built on day-old bread, and both work better with it than with fresh. Bread that has dried out has room to soak up custard, which is the whole mechanism behind a french toast casserole or a strata.
How we work out the cost
Every price is the sum of that recipe's ingredient costs at typical U.S. grocery prices, divided by the servings the recipe makes - not a checkout total. The full method is on how we calculate costs.
Good to know
Breakfast questions
What is a cheap breakfast to make at home?
The cheapest breakfasts on this page are built on eggs, potatoes, oats, or day-old bread rather than meat. 10 of these 17 recipes come in under a dollar a serving, and the least expensive is about $0.30 a plate. The median across the whole collection is $0.92.
What can I make ahead for breakfast?
The breakfast sandwiches and freezer burritos both wrap and freeze for a month and reheat in a couple of minutes. The casseroles can be assembled the night before and baked in the morning, and the baked oatmeal keeps for five days in the fridge.
What is a good breakfast for a crowd?
A 9x13 casserole. 8 of these recipes serve eight or more from a single dish, which is far less work than cooking to order for a table full of people. The breakfast casserole and the hashbrown breakfast casserole each feed ten.
What is a healthy breakfast?
That depends entirely on what you are looking for, and it is not a claim we make about this collection as a whole. What we can show you is measurable: how much protein a serving has, whether a recipe has meat in it, and exactly what it costs. If protein is what you are after, our high-protein meals collection lists everything on the site at 25g or more a serving, checked against standard food data.
How long do these breakfasts take?
Two are done in 30 minutes or less - the egg fried rice and the sausage gravy. The pancakes and the handheld breakfasts land in the 32 to 40 minute range, and the casseroles run from about an hour to an hour and a half, though most of that is oven time rather than your time. 8 of the 17 feed eight or more.