Food inflation: grocery prices, nationally and by city

Food at home, food away from home

The CPI splits food in two. Food at home is what you buy in a grocery store or a supermarket to eat at home: cereals and bakery products, meats, poultry, fish and eggs, dairy, fruits and vegetables, nonalcoholic beverages and other foods. Food away from home covers full service and limited service meals, and other meals and snacks bought out. The BLS food index is the two together; the "food and beverages" group of this site also includes alcoholic beverages, which is why its rate (2.4 %) differs slightly from the food index in the release.

The two halves have moved differently. A restaurant meal includes the service of cooking and serving it, so its price follows much more than the cost of the ingredients. The two indexes need not move together. Over the 12 months to September 2026, food at home rose 1.8 % and food away from home 3.5 %, with full service meals at 3.8 % and limited service meals at 3.2 %.

The weights tell the same story from the other side. In the December 2025 weights, food as a whole is 13.7 % of the CPI-U and food at home 8.3 %: a little more than half of what urban households spend on food goes to groceries, the rest to meals bought out. In the CPI-W the grocery share is larger, 9.5 %.

Inside the grocery basket

The September 2026 release lists the six major grocery groups. Over 12 months, fruits and vegetables rose 3.7 %, nonalcoholic beverages 3.8 %, and cereals and bakery products 2.1 %. In September alone, seasonally adjusted, food at home fell 0.1 %, with beef down 1 %. A single month says little: grocery prices are noisy, and the BLS adjusts them for the season.

Groceries by metro

The spread between metros is wide for a category with largely national prices. Part of it reflects real local differences in what stores charge, and part of it is sample noise: a metro food index rests on a fraction of the prices behind the national one, and the BLS warns that local indexes are more volatile. Two releases in a row pointing the same way say more than one.

The long view

On annual averages, national grocery prices rose most in 2022, 11.4 %, the sharpest increase since 1999 in this file. They fell in 2016, 2017. That is the main difference between groceries and the rest of the basket: a fall in grocery prices over a full year happens, a fall in rents almost never. Even so, the climb since 2019 is larger for groceries than for all items, and it is the price change people see most often, at every trip to the store.

Groceries and the missing October 2025

Like every series on this site, food at home has no index for October 2025: the BLS collected no prices during the lapse in appropriations. Grocery prices were carried forward from September inside the computation, and the November 2025 index compared prices collected in the second half of November with those carried prices. Nationally, food at home went from 316.042 in September 2025 to 313.954 in November. For a grocery bill dated October 2025, the calculator uses September and says so.

What the index can and cannot tell you

The food at home index follows a fixed-quality basket: the same kinds of products, priced each month in a sample of stores. It does not know that you switched brands or that you moved to a discount store. When a package shrinks, the BLS records the change in quantity (its own example is a 64-ounce container of orange juice replaced by a 59-ounce one), so a smaller package at the same price counts as a price increase. If you track your own bills, the change on your receipts can differ from the index for those reasons. For a budget, the calculator gives what the same basket would cost; for a contract, the all items index remains the usual choice.

See the spending group page for the other groups, the core inflation page for the index without food and energy, and the energy page for the other volatile part of the basket.