Tomatoes:
$2.49 per lb
Price History
Price Records
How It Affects Your Burger
At $2.49 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 $0.311 per burger — 9% of the $3.35 composite cost in May 2026.
Over the past 12 months Tomatoes has climbed +46.0% — a sharp move that has made it one of the faster-rising lines in the basket and a direct driver of recent increases in the overall burger cost.
At $2.49, Tomatoes is near the top of its recorded range — its all-time high was $2.69 in April 2026, and its all-time low $1.68 in May 2018.
This page draws on 110 months of BLS Average Price readings for Tomatoes, from January 2017 through May 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 $2.49 per lb, according to BLS CPI Average Price data. The price has changed +46.0% year-over-year.
Each homemade cheeseburger uses 0.125 lbs of tomatoes. At the current price, that adds $0.311 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.