Updated May 2026 · BLS Average Price Data
Data-driven articles about food prices, grocery inflation, and what it really costs to eat at home — every post backed by official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics retail price data, with supporting context from the USDA and the Federal Reserve.
The Burgernomics blog publishes one specific kind of article: a data piece that takes a single question — “Why has ground beef risen so much?”, “How much do you actually save by cooking at home?”, “Which BLS region is cheapest right now?” — and answers it with charts, tables, and direct citations to the underlying datasets. We do not write recipes. We do not write opinion. We write the numbers and the context that makes the numbers legible.
The data foundation is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Average Price Data program, which is the same source the Federal Reserve watches when it judges food inflation. For agricultural context we lean on the USDA Economic Research Service, especially its commodity outlook reports for cattle, dairy, and produce. For restaurant menu pricing we use published menus, Toast POS aggregate datasets, and McDonald's SEC filings.
BLS publishes new average price data each month. When a published article references a specific dollar value, that value reflects the BLS data available at the article's publication date — which is why every post is dated. The live ingredient, regional, and trend pages on this site are refreshed monthly with each new BLS release, so for the freshest snapshot you should pair a blog post with the corresponding live page.
The Big Mac Index measures purchasing power parity using McDonald's prices worldwide. In 2026, a Big Mac costs $5.91 in the US. Here's what it means, its limits, and how the Burgernomics compares.
Read article →A Big Mac costs $5.91. A homemade cheeseburger costs $3.29. We break down why the gap exists and how much you save by cooking, backed by BLS and industry data.
Read article →The Big Mac has risen 22.6% since 2020. Homemade burger ingredients are up 15%. Restaurant burgers cost 4.4x what home cooking costs. Here is the full inflation timeline.
Read article →Which U.S. region has the cheapest burger ingredients? We rank all four BLS regions by homemade cheeseburger cost and show where your dollar goes furthest.
Read article →We break down exactly what a homemade cheeseburger costs in 2026, ingredient by ingredient, using Bureau of Labor Statistics retail price data.
Read article →A decade of ground beef prices tracked from BLS data, from the 2016 lows through the 2022 inflation spike and where prices stand today.
Read article →Which burger ingredients have risen the most? We compare year-over-year price changes for beef, cheese, bread, lettuce, and tomatoes.
Read article →Pair these articles with the live datasets that drive them. The ingredient tracker updates the per-pound retail price for each of the five burger ingredients each month. The regional comparison shows the spread between the four U.S. Census regions. The multi-year trend page traces every month of the composite index. And the methodology documents the BLS series IDs and per-burger weights so any number on this site can be reproduced from the original public-domain source.
The blog focuses on three topics: the cost of building a homemade cheeseburger from BLS retail prices, the gap between cooking at home and eating out, and the long-run trajectory of grocery inflation as it shows up in the five ingredients we track. Every post is anchored to a specific dataset — usually BLS Average Price Data — and reproducible from the underlying public-domain sources.
Posts follow the data. When ground beef sets a new record, we write about ground beef. When the spread between fast food and home cooking widens, we write about that. We avoid speculative or anecdotal pieces — every article includes a chart or table that another researcher could rebuild from the cited BLS, USDA, or industry sources.
Articles are dated, and the headline figures inside each article reflect the BLS data available at that publication date. The live ingredient and regional pages on this site are refreshed monthly with the latest BLS release; the most recent ingredient-price snapshot reflects retail prices through May 2026.
For restaurant comparisons we use published menu prices, McDonald's SEC filings (for Big Mac history), Toast POS aggregate datasets covering tens of thousands of restaurants, and USDA food plan estimates. For inflation framing we cite the Federal Reserve and the BLS Consumer Price Index for food at home and food away from home. Every non-BLS source is named explicitly inside the article that uses it.
Yes. The underlying data is U.S. government public domain (BLS, USDA, Federal Reserve), and our derived index is freely citable. Cite Burgernomics for the composite recipe-weighted cost and regional breakdowns; cite the original government source for raw prices and CPI figures.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI Average Price Data (public domain). Supplementary data from the USDA Economic Research Service and the Federal Reserve. Read the full methodology.
Last updated 2026-05-08 · 7 articles.