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About & methodology
Beef Price Index republishes U.S. federal price data as clean, current, citable pages.
Sources
- Retail prices ($/lb): U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Average Price program (APU series, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted), retrieved via FRED. Monthly.
- Wholesale / cattle: Producer Price Index for slaughter cattle (series WPU0131) and the IMF global beef price (PBEEFUSDM), via FRED. Monthly.
- Herd size: for context we link to USDA NASS Cattle inventory (semiannual); we do not restate its figures.
Update cadence
The site rebuilds daily so the "as of" dates stay current, but the underlying BLS prices are monthly — a new retail figure appears once a month after the CPI release.
Method
Every number on the site is pulled live from the sources above at build time; nothing is hand-entered. Year-over-year and record figures are computed directly from the series. Unknown values render as "—", never as zero.
What this site does not do
No price forecasts, no buy/sell or purchasing advice, no invented statistics. Index series (cattle, global) are labeled as indexes, not dollars per pound.