Contextuality has been identified as a potential resource responsible for the quantum advantage in several tasks. It is then necessary to develop a resource-theoretic framework for contextuality, both in its standard and generalized forms. Here we provide a formal resource-theoretic approach for generalized contextuality based on a physically motivated set of free operations with an explicit parametrisation. Then, using an efficient linear programming characterization for the contextual set of prepared-and-measured statistics, we adapt known resource quantifiers for contextuality and nonlocality to obtain natural monotones for generalized contextuality in arbitrary prepare-and-measure experiments.