About & methodology
Beef Price Index republishes U.S. federal price data as clean, current, citable pages - retail, wholesale and cattle, on one site.
Sources
- Retail prices ($/lb): U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Average Price program (APU series, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted). Monthly, most series back to the 1980s. Fetched from the BLS public API with FRED as a fallback mirror.
- Boxed beef cutout ($/cwt, daily): USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, National Daily Boxed Beef Cutout & Boxed Beef Cuts - Negotiated Sales, afternoon report (LM_XB403), via the USDA LMR data service. History to 2001. The same report supplies daily wholesale ground beef (73% lean).
- Cattle prices ($/cwt, weekly): USDA AMS 5-Area Weekly Weighted Average Direct Slaughter Cattle (LM_CT150) - live FOB steers, over 80% Choice.
- Farm-to-retail spreads: USDA Economic Research Service meat price spreads, monthly back to 1970.
- Inflation: BLS CPI-U series for beef and veal (CUUR0000SEFC) and all items (CUUR0000SA0); the slaughter-cattle PPI (WPU0131).
- Drought: the U.S. Drought Monitor (National Drought Mitigation Center / USDA / NOAA), weekly.
- Global: the IMF global beef price benchmark (PBEEFUSDM), via FRED.
- Herd size: we link to USDA NASS Cattle inventory (semiannual) rather than restating its figures.
The Beef Price Index
The composite Beef Price Index is computed by this site - it is not a government statistic. Formula: each of the four BLS "all uncooked" beef aggregates (ground beef FC1101, steaks FC3101, roasts FC2101, other beef FC4101) is divided by its own 2020 monthly average and multiplied by 100; the index is the simple average of the four. Months missing any component are omitted. The arithmetic is reproducible from the CSVs on the data page.
Update cadence
The site rebuilds daily after the afternoon USDA cutout report, so the wholesale numbers change every trading day. Retail (BLS) figures are monthly - a new value appears with each CPI release; cattle prices are weekly; ERS spreads are monthly. Every figure carries its own as-of date.
Method & integrity
Every number is pulled live from the sources above at build time; nothing is hand-entered. Each series has a plausibility band and a value outside it is dropped rather than published. Year-over-year and record figures are computed directly from the series. Unknown values render as "-", never as zero. October 2025 is missing from all BLS series (the federal data lapse) and is shown as a gap, not interpolated.
What this site does not do
No price forecasts, no buy/sell or purchasing advice, no invented statistics. Wholesale values ($/cwt) are never presented as retail prices ($/lb). Index series are labeled as indexes.
Reuse
All underlying data is U.S.-government public domain. Our charts and CSVs are free to reuse with credit - please link to beefpriceindex.com.