Retail beef prices

Median rather than an average, and never a single week — see the note below. The middle-half column is the 25th to 75th percentile of every weekly comparison, shown because one number would hide how wide the range is. Derived from USDA advertised prices USDA.

Some cuts carry no premium. On those cuts the specialty product is advertised at or below conventional, and a producer told the label pays everywhere would be misled by the omission. Note also that a cut can appear twice under different names — USDA files what the store called it, and a filet and a tenderloin are the same muscle packed differently. We do not merge them, because the names carry genuinely different premiums.

A single week's premium is worthless. In one recent week ground beef 80–89% came out +157.2% — a conventional price set by 52 store ads, against weeks where the same cut runs five to seven thousand. Across 22 weeks that one cut ranged −2.9% to +157.2%. So both sides of every comparison must clear 100 store ads, and the figure shown is always a median over 52 weeks. Rows under the floor are 29.2% of the data and 1.52% of the advertising — and the median moves by barely a point whether the floor is set at 100 or 300, which is the evidence it is real.

Read this as a statement about retail advertising, not about what a producer in that region could capture. Which chains feature grass-fed heavily is not evenly spread across the country, and store mix explains part of the gap. It is a real pattern and a partial explanation, not a conclusion.

Every week is shown rather than one week's change on the year. The year-ago comparison flips sign from week to week — so a single week can point either way. Stores, feature rate and activity index, with their year-ago figures, are all USDA's own USDA; we do not recompute them.

The same cut appears more than once where USDA filed it fresh and frozen, or in different pack sizes — those are different products at different prices and are not merged. Price, low and high are USDA as filed USDA — the average advertised price and the range across stores. A row marked thinly advertised carries fewer than 100store ads: the price is still USDA's, but it describes a handful of stores rather than the national market.

Source: USDA AMS National Retail Report, 25,000+ stores weekly, back to 2016. Prices are advertised prices as filed. The premium figures are ours Derived: the same cut, same week and same region, specialty against conventional, both sides carrying at least 100 store ads, taken as a median across 52 weeks. That comparison is not perfectly clean: a conventional ad runs at thousands of stores while a grass-fed ad runs at a few hundred, and USDA does not say which chains reported, so we cannot fully separate the label from the shop. We bound it instead, above — where a specialty price beats the highest-priced conventional ad in the country, store mix cannot be the explanation. Related: boxed beef for what the packer gets and feeder prices for what the calf brought. This site is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the USDA.