Grocery Price Changes Since 2020

Grocery prices rose faster between 2020 and 2023 than in any comparable stretch since the late 1970s, then slowed to below their long-run average in 2024 and 2025, but they did not fall. A basket that cost $100 at the start of 2020 costs roughly $125 to $130 now, depending on what is in it. Every figure below comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the year and the category named, so you can see which items drove the increase and which are now reversing.

Year by year, food at home

The Economic Research Service tracks the food-at-home Consumer Price Index, which covers grocery store and supermarket purchases, in its Food Price Outlook. Its historical summary gives these annual changes:

2020: food-at-home prices rose 3.5 percent, driven by a jump in meat and poultry prices after the pandemic began. All food rose 3.4 percent.

2022: food-at-home prices rose 11.4 percent. All food rose 9.9 percent, the fastest annual increase since 1979. ERS attributes the spike to an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza that hit egg and poultry supplies, the Russia-Ukraine war’s effect on grain and energy, and economy-wide inflation.

2023: food-at-home prices rose 5.0 percent as supply chain pressure and wholesale prices eased.

2024: food-at-home prices rose 1.2 percent, the smallest increase in the period.

2025: food-at-home prices rose 2.3 percent.

ERS puts the 20-year historical average for food-at-home inflation at 2.6 percent a year. So 2024 and 2025 came in below normal. Household budgets are strained by the level that 2022 and 2023 established, which the slower years have not undone, more than by the recent rate.

Restaurants versus groceries

Food away from home, the ERS term for restaurant and food service purchases, followed a different path. It rose 7.7 percent in 2022, 7.1 percent in 2023, 4.1 percent in 2024, and 3.8 percent in 2025, per the same ERS summary. Its historical average is 3.5 percent a year, so restaurant prices have run above normal every year since 2022, even as grocery inflation cooled. Labor costs weigh more heavily in restaurant prices than in grocery prices, which is the main reason the two series diverged.

The items that moved most

Eggs are the extreme case. ERS reports retail egg prices rose 32.2 percent in 2022, 1.4 percent in 2023, 8.5 percent in 2024, and 21.9 percent in 2025, almost entirely because avian influenza reduced laying flocks. The reversal is now underway: ERS reported retail egg prices in July 2026 were 25.7 percent lower than in July 2025, and its August 2026 forecast calls for egg prices to fall about 30.8 percent for 2026 as flocks recover.

Beef is moving the other way. ERS reported beef and veal prices 9.4 percent higher in July 2026 than a year earlier, driven by a cyclical contraction of the U.S. cattle herd that has pushed wholesale prices to record levels for the season. The August 2026 forecast is for beef and veal prices to rise 9.8 percent for the year.

Other categories ERS flagged as rising faster than their 20-year averages in 2026 include fresh vegetables, up 6.3 percent year over year in July 2026, sugar and sweets, up 7.4 percent, largely from chocolate candy, and nonalcoholic beverages, up 4.1 percent, driven by coffee and tea. Pork, poultry, and dairy are flat or close to it.

Where the index stood in mid-2026

ERS reported that the food-at-home CPI in July 2026 was 2.7 percent higher than in July 2025, and unchanged from June. All food was up 3.0 percent over the year. The all-items CPI, the economy-wide inflation measure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was up 3.4 percent over the same twelve months. Grocery inflation is now running slightly below overall inflation, a reversal of 2022, when it ran far above.

The ERS forecast for full-year 2026 is a 2.5 percent rise in food-at-home prices, with a range of 1.7 to 3.3 percent, and a 3.6 percent rise in food away from home.

Compounding the years

Annual percentages understate the cumulative effect. Multiply the ERS food-at-home changes for 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 together and the basket is about 25 percent more expensive than at the end of 2019 from those five years alone, before adding 2021. That is why shoppers report that groceries feel much more expensive even as the news reports inflation “cooling.” Cooling means the rate of increase slowed while the prices stayed.

What about shrinkflation?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts the CPI for package size changes, so downsizing is already inside the numbers above. Its research series on product size changes found the effect on the all-items index averages about 0.01 percent a year, concentrated in food, beverages, and household paper and cleaning products. Shrinkflation is real and visible in a few aisles, but the grocery inflation of 2022 and 2023 was almost all straightforward price increases.

Prices against wages

Food is a larger share of spending for lower-income households, so the same percentage increase takes a bigger bite at the bottom of the income scale. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009 according to the U.S. Department of Labor; that rate bought roughly a quarter less groceries at the end of 2025 than it did at the start of 2020, using the ERS figures above. Median household income was about $80,000 as of 2023 per the Census Bureau, and while most wages rose during the period, the cumulative grocery increase is the benchmark they had to clear.

That comparison is the reason groups working on cost-of-living issues track food prices alongside housing and healthcare. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3), lists food among the basics that a full-time worker should be able to afford and frames the problem as affordability across categories rather than any single price. The ERS series is the food half of that comparison, and it is updated monthly.

The short version

Groceries rose about 3.5 percent in 2020, 11.4 percent in 2022, 5.0 percent in 2023, 1.2 percent in 2024, and 2.3 percent in 2025, per USDA’s Economic Research Service. Eggs spiked and are now falling. Beef is rising. The overall rate is back below its long-run average, and the level is not coming back down. Anyone comparing a grocery receipt from 2019 with one from this year is not imagining the difference. The federal data says it is about a quarter.