Ground Beef (80% lean):
$6.75 per lb
Price History
Price Records
How It Affects Your Burger
At $6.75 per lb, Ground Beef (80% lean) is the BLS retail price behind one of the five ingredients in the homemade cheeseburger basket. A single burger uses 0.33 lbs, which works out to $2.226 per burger — 66% of the $3.35 composite cost in May 2026.
Ground Beef (80% lean) is up +12.8% year-over-year, running ahead of the Federal Reserve's 2% inflation target and adding upward pressure to the composite cheeseburger cost.
At $6.75, Ground Beef (80% lean) is near the top of its recorded range — its all-time high was $6.90 in April 2026, and its all-time low $3.55 in April 2017.
This page draws on 112 months of BLS Average Price readings for Ground Beef (80% lean), from January 2017 through May 2026. Across that span the price has moved $3.35 between its low and high — a peak-to-trough swing of 95%.
Ground Beef (80% lean) is the protein in the burger, priced from BLS CPI Average Price series APU0000703112 — public-domain federal data refreshed monthly, with no modeling or estimation.
BLS Series: APU0000703112. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (public domain).
Frequently Asked Questions
Ground Beef (80% lean) currently costs $6.75 per lb, according to BLS CPI Average Price data. The price has changed +12.8% year-over-year.
Each homemade cheeseburger uses 0.33 lbs of ground beef (80% lean). At the current price, that adds $2.226 to the cost of each burger.
The all-time high price for ground beef (80% lean) was $6.90 per lb, recorded in April 2026. The all-time low was $3.55, recorded in April 2017.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI, 2026.