Olive Garden's Never-Ending Pasta Pass Is Back: $100 for 13 Weeks

Mark your calendar: Olive Garden's Never-Ending Pasta Pass goes on sale July 16 at 2pm ET, and it will sell out fast!

What's Included

Every visit gets you a Never-Ending First Course of soup or salad plus breadsticks, then unlimited plates of the Never-Ending Pasta Bowl lineup with your choice of toppings. You also get a passport to stamp as you work through the combinations. Gluten-free rotini is included in the rotation too.

Not included: gratuity, alcohol, and beverages. It's dine-in only, one meal redemption per visit, and not valid for To Go, delivery, or online orders.

Worth It?

The math here really depends on how you use it. Olive Garden's own numbers, reported by Axios, say passholders break even after about seven visits, since a single regular Never-Ending Pasta Bowl runs $14.99 without the pass. Here's what that looks like at different levels:

The occasional visitor: If you're only stopping by a handful of times over 13 weeks, you're close to breakeven and mostly paying for the option to go whenever you feel like it. Not a huge win, but not a loss either.

Dinner once a week: 13 dinners over 13 weeks at $14.99 each comes out to about $195 in value off a $100 pass, roughly $95 saved. That's a realistic pace for someone who just likes Olive Garden and goes on a normal schedule.

Lunch and dinner: Since the pass is redeemable once per visit rather than once per day, a lunch and a separate dinner both count. Do that even once or twice a week and you're stacking up meals fast, easily 25 to 30+ redemptions over the 13 weeks and several hundred dollars in value.

The extreme: Technically nothing stops you from doing lunch and dinner every single day for all 13 weeks, that's 182 possible meals. Presumably nobody is actually doing that, but it shows how lopsided the value gets the harder you use it. Just know the pass is dine-in only and good for one redemption per visit, so there's no stacking extra bowls to go or taking food home. Every meal has to happen at the table.

One of our colleagues scored the Lifetime Pasta Pass, an older tier that isn't part of this year's offer, shows what that curve looks like over the long run: 142 meals, $1,207 saved, and $2,154 in total value off a $100 pass. That's an extreme outlier since it never expired, but it's a real example of what "use it and it pays for itself many times over" looks like.

If you make Olive Garden a part of your routine, the Pasta Pass is a great opportunity to snag a quality deal and save on food costs, while enjoying enjoy some unlimited salad and breadsticks. Our colleague very much enjoyed all 182+ meals. May the odds ever be in your favor should you go for it.