By the Numbers: What your meal plan offerings cost

Meal plans offer students dining hall access, dining dollars and meal exchanges for a fixed price.

Lynne Romanelli, Reporter

March 3, 2025

All freshmen and sophomores at Northwestern are placed on the Open Access meal plan, but after their first two years, other meal plan options become available. As students consider what meal plan will best suit their needs, or whether to purchase any meal plan at all, they might want to determine the cost of each plan in relation to what it offers.

The six meal plans offered by NU Dining differ in dining hall meal swipes, dining dollars, meal exchanges and price. While off-campus upperclassmen can purchase any of the six options or no meal plan each quarter, juniors and seniors living in on-campus housing are restricted to the Open Access, Wildcat 14 or Paw 110 plans.

These are the meal plans offered for Winter Quarter 2025.

Meal swipes give students access to the “all-you-can-eat” dining halls, while meal exchanges allow students to choose from select food items at certain retail dining locations on campus. Dining dollars can be used like regular currency at any of these on-campus retail locations.

Students can use meal swipes at any of the four dining halls on campus — Allison Dining Commons, Elder Dining Commons, Sargent Dining Commons and Foster-Walker Dining Commons. They can use dining dollars to purchase food items at 16 different locations on the Evanston campus, including Shake Smart and Tech Express, while meal exchanges for a shortened list of menu items are only offered at seven of these locations.

Beginning their junior year, students can choose their meal plan option each quarter. Students can upgrade their meal plan at any time, but if they want to change to a smaller plan, they have to do so by the first Friday of the quarter.

A closer look at the price of each meal plan shows that the larger three plans are close in price, with just a $43 difference between the Open Access and Wildcat 14 plans. The price varies more for smaller plans, which are available to off-campus students, graduate students, faculty and staff.

This graph shows what each meal swipe costs on the five limited meal plans, alongside the door rates for each meal in the dining hall.

To find the total price of the meal swipes for each plan, we subtracted the value of dining dollars and meal exchanges in the plan from its total price, then divided the total price by the number of meal swipes in the plan.

We estimated the meal exchange price from the median price of all meal exchanges offered, which is $11.29.

Also included in the graph are the door rates for each meal at the four dining halls, which are outside any meal plan and can be paid with Cat Cash or debit or credit card. Any student can purchase Cat Cash, which is placed on their WildCard and, like dining dollars, can be used to make purchases at any of the dining locations on campus.

The below graph ranks meal plans and door rates by how much each meal swipe costs, depending on how many someone uses per week.

This graph shows at what number of meals per week it is less expensive to buy a certain plan over another, or to pay the door rate each time instead of purchasing a meal plan. For example, at four meals per week, the Purple 50 plan is less expensive than the other available meal plans at that point. It is also less expensive per meal than paying the lunch or dinner door rate each time, even though at four meals per week not all 50 meal swipes available on the plan are used. For 15 or more meals per week, the Open Access plan is less expensive per meal than paying the lowest door rate.

The following table analyzes how much students are really paying per meal, depending on how many meal swipes one uses per week. Meal swipes expire at the end of the quarter, or at the end of the week for the Wildcat 14 plan.

To see how much you’re paying for each of your meals on any one meal plan, search through this table of cost per meal.

When deciding which meal plan to choose based on how many meal swipes students anticipate using, it is worthwhile to consider all the options available and the cost of each.

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