Templates
Monthly meal planner template
A month of dinners as a calendar, one line per day, with a strip at the bottom for the things worth buying once a month rather than once a week. Undated on purpose, so it works whichever month you print it in.
Or press Ctrl+P (⌘P on a Mac) and choose “Save as PDF”.
The template
Monthly meal planner
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Stock up this month
How to use it
A month grid holds dinners and nothing else. There is no honest way to plan thirty breakfasts in advance, and a monthly sheet that tries becomes a wall of handwriting nobody reads. One line per day, the evening meal only — that is the decision worth making a month ahead, because it is the one that drives the shopping.
Plan it as four repeating weeks, not thirty separate days. Pick five or six dinners the household actually likes, spread them across the first week, then let them recur every seven to ten days with one new thing per week. That is close to how people already eat, and it makes a month's plan a fifteen-minute job instead of an evening's work.
Theme nights do most of the remaining work. Fixing one weekday as pasta, one as fish, one as whatever needs using up narrows each decision from "what shall we eat" to "which pasta" — and a narrowed decision gets made. Write the themes into the day columns at the top before you fill anything in.
The stock-up strip is what a month buys you that a week does not. Rice, flour, oil, tinned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, coffee: bulk items whose price per unit drops when you buy them monthly and whose weekly shop only ever produces the small expensive pack. Fill the strip once you can see the month, because that is when you can count how many times each of them appears.
Leave the spare cells blank. The grid is six rows of seven, which is the most any calendar month can occupy — a 31-day month starting on a Saturday — so no month ever runs off the bottom. Most months leave part of the last row empty; cross it out rather than reprinting.
FAQ
Why is the calendar undated?
So one sheet works for every month, including next year's. Dated printables go stale, and a template that has to be regenerated every month is a template that eventually is not there when you want it. Write the numbers into the cells — it takes under a minute. If you have JavaScript on, the "Add dates" buttons above the grid will fill them in for you before you print; the sheet stays blank and printable either way.
Is it free?
Yes: free, no email, nothing to install. The calendar is on this page and the print button sends it to a printer or to "Save as PDF". We are building a nutrition and meal planning app whose waitlist is open, but this sheet does not depend on it.
Can I plan lunches and breakfasts on it too?
Not on this sheet — the cells are one line each, sized for a dinner. If you want every meal slot planned, use the weekly planner and print four of them; a month of full meal slots is a level of detail that is far easier to keep in a week at a time.
How many weeks does the grid have?
Six rows of seven. Five is enough for most months but not all of them: a long month that starts late in the week spills into a sixth partial week, which happens several times a year. Six rows hold every possible case, so nothing ever has to be squeezed into a margin. The stock-up strip below is separate and is not part of the calendar.
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