The renewal email from Costco arrived the second week of April, and under the $65 Gold Star renewal was a friendly little box asking whether we'd like to upgrade to Executive for $130 and earn 2% back. I didn't click anything. I opened the spreadsheet, where every Costco receipt from 2025 already lives, and asked it instead.
We go to the Costco in Plano every four or five weeks on a Saturday morning, Matt pushing the cart and me holding the list. In 2025 that came to twelve trips and $4,380. Here's where it went, whether the membership pays for itself, and whether the upgrade would.
What $4,380 bought
- Groceries and household basics: $3,010. Rotisserie chickens, five-dozen egg flats, cheddar by the block, butter, pork shoulders, rice, peanut butter, Goldfish, paper towels, toilet paper, dish soap and laundry detergent. All of this counts against our weekly grocery budget.
- Diapers and wipes: $624. About $52 a month for Rosie's Kirkland diapers, tracked on their own line.
- Everything else: $746. Christmas gifts, kids' shoes, socks for Matt, a bike helmet for Eli, a sleeping bag for Wyatt. Most of it landed in November and December.
Does the $65 pay for itself?
To find out, I took the twenty things we buy most at Costco and priced the same amounts at Aldi or Kroger, using my own receipts from the same months. Some of the gaps were big. Last April a five-dozen flat of eggs was $11.99 at Costco, when the same sixty eggs at Aldi would have cost $23.35. Eggs have come way down since (the flat is $7.99 now, against $11.25 at Aldi), but they made a real difference last spring. Diapers were the biggest single gap all year. The rotisserie chicken is still $4.99, and I can't roast a chicken for that. I've tried.
Added up, those twenty items saved us about $430 in 2025 compared with buying them at our other stores. Take off the $65 membership and we're about $365 ahead.
Then the honest part. Costco makes it easy to buy more than you meant to. Last summer's giant variety pack of chips lasted six days. Matt and the jerky aisle have a relationship I don't interfere with. Going back through the receipts, I'd guess $150 to $200 of 2025 was stuff we didn't need or wouldn't have bought in a normal-sized package. Knock off $200 and we still came out about $165 ahead. Good enough for me.
One more thing I checked, since it's the kind of thing that hides in a budget: our grocery cash-back card doesn't count Costco as a supermarket, so nothing we spend there earns its 6%. On paper that's a cost of shopping at Costco. In practice we hit the card's yearly cap in October anyway, so moving that spending to Aldi wouldn't have earned us much more. That's how it shakes out with our habits. Somebody who shops differently could see it come out the other way.
The Executive math
Executive costs $130, which is $65 more than we pay now. It returns 2% on most purchases as a reward certificate once a year. Our 2025 spending was $4,380, and 2% of that is $87.60. Subtract the extra $65 and the upgrade would have put us $22.60 ahead last year. That assumes everything we bought earned the reward. I didn't go through Costco's list of what's excluded line by line, so the real figure is probably a little lower.
This year looks different. Rosie is starting to show interest in the potty, and when the diapers stop, about $52 a month of Costco spending stops with them. Eggs are back to a price where I buy them at Aldi most weeks. My best guess for 2026 is around $3,600 at Costco. Two percent of that is $72, so the upgrade would leave us about $7 ahead, and only if I remember to go get the certificate.
Seven dollars is a wash. It's also one more thing to keep track of, and I already keep track of a lot. We're staying Gold Star.
What I'd tell myself next April
The membership earns its keep for a family of five that buys diapers, eggs, cheese and meat in quantity, at least by my receipts. A household that shops there less, or one that has already outgrown diapers, could look at the same math and land somewhere else, and that's the whole reason I run it every year instead of renewing on autopilot.
I paid the $65 and closed the email. Then I put a reminder on next April's calendar: rerun the Costco tab. Our first year without diapers might tell a different story, and the spreadsheet will be the first to know.
