Every month, the UK government's Office for National Statistics (ONS) sends people into supermarkets and shops across the country to record the actual shelf price of hundreds of everyday items — bacon, eggs, bread and more. We take those real retail prices, work out exactly how much of each ingredient goes into a standard fry up (2 eggs, 2 rashers of bacon, etc.), and add it all up. The number you see is what a full English would cost you at an average UK shop — no guesswork, just official government price data.

The ONS (Office for National Statistics) is the UK government's official number-crunching body. They track the prices of thousands of everyday items every month — everything from bread to bacon — to measure how the cost of living is changing. All the price data on this site comes from them.

For some ingredients the ONS doesn't publish a direct price, so we use their CPI food index instead. CPI (Consumer Prices Index) tracks how food prices rise over time as a percentage. We take a known starting price and apply those percentage changes to estimate what the item costs today. It's a best approximation, not a till receipt.

The ONS publishes new inflation data roughly once a month, usually about six weeks after the reference period. So the prices you see here are typically one to two months behind today — but they're official, verified figures rather than supermarket estimates.

Bacon, eggs, sausages — these aren't luxuries. Tracking their price is a surprisingly honest window into the cost of living crisis, and frankly if we can't afford a proper fry up, something has gone very wrong with this country.