Applebee's Lunch Menu 2026: Prices, Combos & Best Picks

Applebee's Lunch: Quick Answers

The Honest Answer: There Is No Separate Lunch Menu

Search for an Applebee's lunch menu and you will find pages listing lunch combos, midday-only prices and a $5.99 lunch deal with neat 11-to-3 hours. Checked against Applebee's own website, none of that holds up nationally. The official specials page describes lunch specials in general terms, then says they may vary by location and are subject to change — and tells guests to ask their local restaurant. No items, no prices and no fixed lunch hours are published for the country as a whole. Our longer investigation, including the stale claims to ignore, is in the Applebee's lunch menu prices guide.

That is not bad news for lunch. It means the whole menu is in play from the moment the doors open — most locations open at 11:00 AM — and nothing you would order at dinner is off limits at noon. The real lunch questions are narrower and more useful: Which full plates cost the least? Which ones are light enough that 2 PM still feels fine? And which running deal, if any, beats ordering straight off the menu? The tables below answer those three questions with the site's actual menu data, computed from the items themselves rather than copied from another site's lunch list.

One caveat applies to every figure here, the same one that applies across this guide: most Applebee's restaurants are run by franchise owners who set their own prices, so treat each price as a close, recently checked guide rather than a quote. Your restaurant's menu is the final word, and a local lunch special — where one exists — sits on top of everything on this page.

Best Lunch Picks Under $14

This table is built from the menu data at build time: salads, sandwiches, bowls and entrées — the plates that work as a lunch on their own — filtered to a price of $14.00 or less and sorted cheapest first. It is a short list, and that shortness is the finding. Most full entrées sit above $14 at regular prices, which is exactly why the meal deal at the top of the table matters: its three sandwiches are the only full lunches under $10, and each one includes fries and a fountain drink in the price.

Read the table with the calories column in view, because cheap and light are not the same thing at Applebee's. The sub-$10 sandwiches are filling, full-sized builds that run past 1,000 calories each; the one genuinely light line in the table is the House Side Salad, which is a side rather than a meal. The middle ground is the Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad — a full entrée salad under the $14 line. If your budget stretches a dollar or two past the table, the full list of salads, bowls and sandwiches is on the full menu with prices, where every item carries its price and calorie count.

Soup & Salad Combos

The classic light lunch — a bowl of soup next to a salad — needs one honest label at Applebee's. The soups are real: tomato basil soup and French onion soup both appear in Applebee's published nutrition data, with the calories shown below. But the menu data we track carries no standalone soup item with its own price; tomato basil soup reaches most tables as the dipping soup served with the Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger. So the combos below pair each real soup with the real House Side Salad, total the calories exactly, and mark the price honestly instead of inventing a soup price to make the table look complete.

On calories alone, soup and salad is the lightest real lunch combination on this page: the tomato basil pairing comes in under 400 calories, less than a quarter of most entrées. Just go in knowing the soup half is priced by your restaurant. Ask for the soup price when you order, and if your location will not sell a bowl on its own, the burger row above is the fully priced version of the same idea — soup included, salad added, every dollar accounted for before you sit down.

Lunch for Two: Split the 2 for $25

If lunch is for two — a coworker, a friend, a kid old enough for a full entrée — the best value move is rarely two picks from the table above. The 2 for $25 bundles one full-size appetizer, or two side salads instead, with two full-size entrées for $25 flat. Split evenly, that is $12.50 per person for an entrée plus a share of the starter: less per person than most single entrées cost on their own, and the side-salad swap is the version to take when both of you want to keep the meal lighter.

The maths has one honest boundary. Two Really BIG Meal Deals cost $19.98 for two people — cheaper than the 2 for $25 — but both of you are eating a sandwich, with no shared starter and no entrée choice. The 2 for $25 wins when you want real entrées, variety, or the salad swap; the meal deal wins on price alone. Every other running offer, with its terms, is tracked on Applebee's deals and specials.

The Lightest Lunches on the Menu

Ranked by calories from the same menu data, these are the lightest full lunch items — entrées, bowls, salads and sandwiches, with the House Side Salad left to the combos above because a side is not a lunch by itself. The pattern is clear: bowls and grilled plates cluster at the top, and even the heaviest row here is lighter than a typical burger or pasta. Prices are shown where the menu publishes one; the two skillets are listed as priced locally, and we would rather show that than guess.

A word of proportion: lightest is a relative term on this menu. Nothing in the table is a diet plate, and the salads further down the full menu run far heavier than the bowls above them — a salad is not automatically the light choice. For the complete calorie, sodium and protein picture behind every figure here, the calories and nutrition guide breaks the same items down nutrient by nutrient.

Lunch Timing: All Day, and the Happy Hour Overlap

Because there is no separate lunch menu, there is also no lunch cutoff to beat. The full menu runs from open to close, most locations open at 11:00 AM, and the kitchen serves the same items at noon as at seven in the evening. That makes Applebee's lunch unusually flexible: an early lunch, a late lunch and a working lunch ordered to go all draw on the same menu and the same prices. What changes through the day is not the menu — it is which promotions are live.

The promotion that matters at lunchtime starts mid-afternoon. At participating locations, happy hour typically runs from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, with a set list of appetizers at half price for dine-in guests. A lunch that slides past 3:00 PM — the long business lunch, the errands-that-ran-late lunch — can order from that list, which turns a shared appetizer into the cheapest course of the meal. Times, the appetizer list and participation vary by restaurant, and a handful of states restrict drink discounts, so the food half of the deal is the reliable half.

However you time it, the planning order that works is simple: decide solo or shared first (meal deal under $10, or the 2 for $25 split at $12.50 each), check the under-$14 table if you are ordering straight off the menu, and keep the soup-and-salad combination in mind when the afternoon cannot carry a 1,400-calorie entrée. The full menu has every item with pictures, prices and calories, and if a local lunch special is running near you, it will be posted at the restaurant itself — the one place a location-only deal can ever honestly live.