Tomatoes:
$2.00 per lb
Price History
Price Records
How It Affects Your Burger
At $2.00 per lb, Tomatoes is the BLS retail price behind one of the five ingredients in the homemade cheeseburger basket. A single burger uses 0.125 lbs, which works out to $0.250 per burger — 8% of the $3.33 composite cost in July 2026.
Tomatoes is up +11.7% year-over-year, running ahead of the Federal Reserve's 2% inflation target and adding upward pressure to the composite cheeseburger cost.
At $2.00, Tomatoes sits in the middle of its recorded range, between an all-time low of $1.68 in May 2018 and an all-time high of $2.69 in April 2026.
This page draws on 112 months of BLS Average Price readings for Tomatoes, from January 2017 through July 2026. Across that span the price has moved $1.01 between its low and high — a peak-to-trough swing of 61%.
Tomatoes is a produce item, the part of the basket most exposed to seasonal and weather-driven swings, priced from BLS CPI Average Price series APU0000712311 — public-domain federal data refreshed monthly, with no modeling or estimation.
BLS Series: APU0000712311. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (public domain).
Frequently Asked Questions
Tomatoes currently costs $2.00 per lb, according to BLS CPI Average Price data. The price has changed +11.7% year-over-year.
Each homemade cheeseburger uses 0.125 lbs of tomatoes. At the current price, that adds $0.250 to the cost of each burger.
The all-time high price for tomatoes was $2.69 per lb, recorded in April 2026. The all-time low was $1.68, recorded in May 2018.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI, 2026.