The Receipt
Watch Ground Beef Quadruple, and the Steak Dinner Walk Off
Two animated charts of the meat case. Ground beef went from $1.57 a pound in 2000 to $6.75. The nice steak climbed 71% in just seven years. Here is the run, year by year.
Everybody has a number in their head for what a pound of ground beef should cost. For a lot of us it is stuck somewhere around two or three dollars, because that is what it was the last time we really looked. Then you actually look, and the number has run off without you.
So we charted the run, month by month, from the national average price the government has tracked the whole time.
The slow climb, then the rip
A pound of 100% ground beef averaged about $1.57 back in 2000. For years it crept, the way a lot of grocery prices crept, a few cents at a time that nobody clocks. Then after 2020 the line stops creeping and starts climbing. The May 2026 national average is $6.75 a pound. That is up about 330 percent over the run.
Ground beef used to be the thing you reached for when money was tight. The fallback that turned into tacos, chili, a meatloaf that fed everybody twice. The fallback got expensive.
Useful source trail: the long-run meat prices come from BLS Average Price Data, and the sirloin series is available through FRED economic data. The store cross-check is a live Kroger Products API snapshot, so it is a dated receipt, not a permanent shelf promise.
The honest part about that $6.75
If you just looked at your own receipt and thought “mine costs more than that,” you are right, and here is why. That $6.75 is a national average that blends every kind of ground beef, including the cheap fatty 73/27, store brands, and whatever is on sale that week. The leaner stuff costs more. Our own live Kroger pull on the same day proves it:
- 73/27, the fattiest: $5.99 a pound
- 80/20: $7.49
- 85/15: $8.49
- 93/7, the leanest: $9.49
The national average lands right between 73/27 and 80/20, exactly where a blend should. If you buy 85/15 or 90/10 like most folks do, you are paying eight or nine dollars, well above the line. The chart is the floor of the conversation, not the ceiling.
How to compare meat without fooling yourself
Meat prices get slippery because the package names are doing a lot of work. Ground beef, ground chuck, family pack, lean percentage, steak cut, bone-in, boneless, choice, select: every label changes the receipt.
| Label to check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Price per pound | The package total hides whether the pack got smaller. |
| Lean percentage | 80/20 and 93/7 are not the same product. |
| Cut and grade | Sirloin, ribeye, chuck, choice, and select move differently. |
| Fresh vs marked down | A sale sticker is useful, but it is not the regular shelf. |
Now the steak
We wanted to do the same thing for a ribeye, because that is the steak everybody pictures. Turns out the government does not track ribeye with any real history, so we charted the next best continuously tracked premium cut, USDA Choice sirloin.
Sirloin averaged $8.35 a pound in 2019. By May 2026 it was $14.27. That is up 71 percent in seven years, and it is the polite cut. A real ribeye at the counter runs higher still. The steak dinner did not get more expensive in some dramatic, headline way. It just quietly walked out of the weekly budget and into the special-occasion column.
Put the two together and you get the whole story of the meat case. The cheap protein quadrupled. The nice protein left. This is the same squeeze we charted on the rest of the cart since 2000, and the reason the same dinner now costs more minutes of your work than it used to.
If ground beef is your budget line, the cheap-protein breakdown has the rest of the staples that quietly became luxuries.
What does a pound of ground beef cost at your store this week, and what lean do you actually buy?
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Price Data, national U.S. city average. Ground beef, 100% beef (series APU0000703112), monthly Jan 2000 to May 2026. Steak, USDA Choice sirloin, boneless (series APU0000703613, via FRED), monthly Jan 2019 to May 2026. Live store-brand cross-check: Kroger On the Rhine, Cincinnati, pulled 2026-06-13. Pulled 2026-06-13.
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