What a UF meal plan actually buys

Two products under one heading

UF puts everything it sells on one meal plan page, so it reads as a single list you pick one row from. There are really two kinds of thing on it, and they answer different questions.

A swipe plan buys a fixed number of meals for the semester. A Flex plan buys a balance and nothing else. Flex is sold at face value, so there is no working out to do on it: what you pay is what lands on the card. A swipe plan is where the arithmetic lives, because part of its price can be a required Flex balance rather than meals.

Every plan that comes with meals

The price, the number of swipes, the balance bundled into that price, and what one swipe works out to once that balance is taken back out.

The Flex plans are not in this table. They have no swipe count, so there is no cost per meal to print for them, and a row with an empty last column would look like missing data rather than a plan that does not have that figure.

What one swipe costs

UF prints a price per meal beside most of these plans. The figure below is derived the same way for every one of them, by taking the required balance out of the price and dividing by the swipes, and where UF publishes its own figure the derived one lands on it.

Cheapest swipe at the top. On a plan that bundles nothing the two figures are the same, because there is nothing to take out, and the pair only separates on the plans that require a balance. One plan on this list spends only at a single kosher location, so its figure is the cost of a meal there rather than of a meal anywhere on campus.

When the swipes stop working

A swipe count is only worth what you manage to spend before the term ends. UF publishes the dates its dining service runs between, and the swipes end with them.

The date is the end of the fall dining window, and the swipes are what it applies to. Whatever is left in the count on that date is gone, and the value beside it is what a single skipped meal costs you, which depends on the plan you bought.

Flex ends on a different schedule and this date is not it. Under UF's own terms, Flex rolls forward into the following term while a plan continues, and it is forfeited at the end of the spring semester rather than in the fall. Retail equivalencies, bonus meals and the mobile order credit some plans include are not modelled in any figure on this page.