American Cheese:
$5.69 per lb
Price History
Price Records
How It Affects Your Burger
At $5.69 per lb, American Cheese is the BLS retail price behind one of the five ingredients in the homemade cheeseburger basket. A single burger uses 0.063 lbs, which works out to $0.358 per burger — 11% of the $3.35 composite cost in May 2026.
American Cheese is down -3.8% year-over-year — a small decline that has eased its contribution to the composite cheeseburger cost.
At $5.69, American Cheese sits in the middle of its recorded range, between an all-time low of $4.75 in May 2017 and an all-time high of $6.12 in August 2025.
This page draws on 112 months of BLS Average Price readings for American Cheese, from January 2017 through May 2026. Across that span the price has moved $1.38 between its low and high — a peak-to-trough swing of 29%.
American Cheese is the dairy component of the burger, priced from BLS CPI Average Price series APU0000710212 — public-domain federal data refreshed monthly, with no modeling or estimation.
BLS Series: APU0000710212. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (public domain).
Frequently Asked Questions
American Cheese currently costs $5.69 per lb, according to BLS CPI Average Price data. The price has changed -3.8% year-over-year.
Each homemade cheeseburger uses 0.063 lbs of american cheese. At the current price, that adds $0.358 to the cost of each burger.
The all-time high price for american cheese was $6.12 per lb, recorded in August 2025. The all-time low was $4.75, recorded in May 2017.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI, 2026.