If you have noticed more “pay in four” buttons creeping into everyday shopping, you are not imagining it. A new survey finds that a rising share of shoppers are using buy now, pay later for groceries, not just for sneakers or small electronics. LendingTree’s latest annual polling shows that 25 percent of BNPL users say they have used it to pay for groceries this year, up from 14 percent a year earlier. That is a swift jump for a category that used to be dominated by discretionary buys. The number matters because groceries are a recurring bill that shows up every week, not a one-off splurge that you can plan around or cut for a month.
To understand why this is happening, look first at the grocery budget itself. Prices are not spiraling the way they did in 2022, yet they remain elevated compared with a few years ago, and year-over-year changes keep nibbling at paychecks. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the food-at-home index in July rose 2.2 percent from a year earlier, while overall food-away-from-home prices rose 3.9 percent. When a category that already takes a large share of the household budget keeps edging higher, families feel it quickly in weekly cash flow, and many start hunting for any tool that flattens the month-to-month pinch.
Now layer on how BNPL actually works. The classic version divides a purchase into four equal payments over six weeks, usually with no interest if you pay on time. That pitch is persuasive at the register, and the underwriting is designed to be fast. In a comprehensive market study, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau documented how pay-in-four borrowing expanded since 2019 and how little of it shows up in traditional credit files, which makes it easy for people to stack multiple small loans without any one lender seeing the full picture. The same analysis found that 21 percent of consumers with a credit record used BNPL at least once in 2022, that roughly 63 percent of BNPL borrowers had multiple simultaneous loans at some point in the year, and that originations skewed toward consumers with subprime or deep subprime scores. That cocktail of speed, opacity and stacking is exactly what makes BNPL feel effortless in the moment and risky afterward if cash runs tight.
The Federal Reserve’s annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking adds another layer. In the 2024 wave, 15 percent of adults reported using BNPL in the prior year, up from 10 percent in 2021. Of those who used it, nearly one in four paid late, a clear jump from the previous year. Most striking, 58 percent of BNPL users said they turned to it because it was the only way they could afford the purchase. When people are using installment plans to bridge an essential like food, that is not convenience, it is a red flag that monthly obligations are pressing beyond stable cash flow.
This is why experts are concerned about Americans using BNPL for groceries. Start with the basic nature of the expense. Groceries are not a one-time buy that you can postpone or negotiate down in one phone call. They recur every week, and the cart rarely goes to zero. Turning a recurring need into a string of short-term debts can create an overlapping ladder of due dates that is hard to track and easy to miss. Missed payments on BNPL do not typically trigger retroactive interest the way some store cards do, but they do come with late fees, and the Fed’s data show those late fees are common. Once late fees start, the “free” part of the plan vanishes and the stress multiplies.
The second concern is visibility. Historically, many BNPL providers have not furnished data to the major credit bureaus, which meant lenders could not see your total BNPL exposure in a credit check, and you could not build much credit with on-time payments either. That is changing in real time. Affirm began reporting all pay-over-time loans to Experian as of April 1 and to TransUnion as of May 1. FICO has launched new scores that incorporate BNPL data, with rollout in the fall of 2025. This is good for transparency and can help disciplined users, but it also raises the stakes. If groceries are landing on BNPL and you are juggling multiple plans, missed payments will no longer live in the shadows. They will increasingly follow you into loan applications and could raise your cost of borrowing for years.
A third worry is stacking behavior. The CFPB’s analysis showed that a majority of borrowers took out multiple BNPL loans at once during the year and that the pattern peaks during high-spend seasons. Groceries are different from holiday gifts, but the math is similar. If you have two or three pay-in-four plans outstanding and then add groceries on top, you have to manage several automatic debits across the next six weeks, often tied to a debit card or checking account. The autopay feature reduces friction, but it also reduces your margin for error. If a paycheck lands late or an unexpected bill hits, you can fall behind across several plans at once, which is exactly how late fees cluster.
The larger backdrop also matters. Prices are still higher than before the pandemic, households have been drawing down excess savings for two years, and many fixed costs such as rent, insurance and utilities have settled at a new normal that crowds out flexibility. In that context, a no-interest installment for this week’s food shop feels like smart cash management. The problem is that it can mask the real issue, which is a budget that no longer closes reliably at month end. You can defer a clothing purchase to give your budget room to heal. You cannot skip dinner.
So what should you do if you have started to rely on BNPL at the supermarket? Begin with clarity, not shame. Open your banking app or card portal and pull a clean ninety-day snapshot of spending by category. If the line for groceries is creeping up faster than income, or if your total debt service and recurring bills push your checking account under two weeks of living expenses by mid-month, treat that as your signal that the underlying plan needs attention. It is tempting to view BNPL as a harmless bridge, yet bridges that you cross every week are not bridges. They are part of the road. When an installment plan becomes the road for essentials, you need a re-route.
The first route is to right-size the grocery bill without hollowing out your diet. Most families can find a predictable five to ten percent reduction simply by standardizing where they shop, tightening impulse buys, and leaning into store brands for staples. You do not need a radical pantry overhaul to reclaim fifty to eighty dollars a month. You do need the calm discipline to repeat the same handful of cost-saving moves every week. Many households also benefit from a “repeatable cart” approach, which means you keep a base list of items that deliver the meals you actually cook on weeknights, rather than shopping from scratch. That kind of repetition is unglamorous, but it is exactly what brings the bill back to earth.
The second route is to separate short-term smoothing from long-term borrowing. BNPL is marketed as short-term smoothing, yet when you stack plans it starts to act like long-term borrowing because something is always coming due. If you are paying in full on a rewards credit card, that card is a better smoothing tool than BNPL because you control a single due date, you can schedule one payment that fits your pay cycle, and you have stronger dispute protections if a transaction goes wrong. If you cannot pay a credit card in full, then a temporary no-interest plan can still be useful, but the rule has to be strict. Essentials can land on a single, controlled line of credit only if you balance the rest of the budget to guarantee payoff on time, every time. Otherwise you are simply moving stress from one calendar square to another.
A third route is to rebuild a cushion. The truth most budgets reveal is that BNPL for essentials begins when the buffer disappears. A cushion does not have to arrive as a heroic lump sum. It can begin at twenty or thirty dollars a week diverted into a separate savings bucket labeled “weekly float.” That small float is not an emergency fund in the classic sense. It is a shock absorber for the next two or three checkout lines. Over the course of a season it grows into breathing room, and breathing room is what lets you say no the next time a pay-in-four button flashes for a bag of groceries.
It also helps to plan for the weeks that do the most damage. Households overshoot during travel weeks, holiday weeks, and weeks when school or work routines shift. If you know when those weeks are coming, pre-fund them. A simple way to do it is to split the month into four miniature budgets that match your payday cadence and then earmark a small top-up for the high-risk week. That turns surprise into surveillance. Once you can see the spikes, you can cushion them.
If you are already managing several BNPL plans and feel like you are losing track, simplify the system before you fix the numbers. List each plan with its original purchase amount, remaining payments, and exact due dates. Then schedule your checking account transfers to land one or two days before each debit. The goal is to stop the chaos first. Once the calendar is under control, make a rule that you do not open a fresh BNPL plan until two existing ones are fully closed. You will feel the friction immediately, and that friction is your friend. It reintroduces choice at the moment that matters.
There is also a credit story unfolding here that you cannot ignore. For years, BNPL lived outside the credit-scoring world. That is changing fast. Affirm now reports all pay-over-time loans to Experian and TransUnion. FICO will roll out scores that incorporate BNPL data this fall. This is not a reason to fear the system. It is a reason to treat BNPL the way you treat any loan that can raise or lower your cost of money. If you use it rarely, pay it on time, and keep the number of open plans low, the new transparency can work in your favor. If you are using BNPL because it is the only way to afford recurring purchases, then the new transparency will reflect that stress, and lenders will price it accordingly.
Finally, it is worth acknowledging why the trend feels so sticky. BNPL is designed to make you feel like a careful planner even when you are really postponing a problem. It takes a total that would make you flinch and breaks it into pieces you can nod at. For a one-time flight or a laptop you will use for three years, that can be smart. For milk, eggs and bread, it is a signal. When a recurring need requires recurring debt to clear the checkout line, the math is telling you to zoom out. The fix is not at the register. It is in the structure of the month.
If you want a crisp way to check your risk in ten minutes, try two numbers. First, compute your grocery bill as a share of take-home pay over the last month. If it is creeping upward month after month without a change in family size or diet, you are seeing price level pressure, not just price change, and that calls for a standardized weekly plan. Second, tally how many separate due dates you manage across cards, BNPL plans and utilities. If you are juggling more than seven or eight, the odds of a late fee rise sharply simply because the calendar is noisy. Reducing the number of due dates is as powerful as reducing the number of debts, because it restores attention. Once attention returns, late fees fall, and once late fees fall, the “free” part of pay-in-four can stop pretending to be free and go back to being what it was meant to be, a rare tool for a specific purchase that does not repeat every week.
The grocery checkout is where financial habits meet real life. The data shows more Americans are tapping BNPL to smooth that moment, and the concern is not abstract. BNPL usage is rising, late payments are common among users, and a growing share of these transactions will soon count toward your credit profile. If you are using BNPL for groceries today, treat it as a temporary bridge while you rebuild the parts of your budget that will carry you next month without help. The most powerful change is rarely a dramatic cut. It is a quiet, repeatable routine that lowers the bill, widens the buffer, and keeps your score clean while you get past a period when prices feel too high and the month feels too short. The numbers may not move in a single week. They will move when your process becomes boring and steady again, which is exactly what a healthy grocery budget looks like.
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