How much will groceries cost this week? Use this Grocery Price Tracker

Jesi Aviles knows exactly what her weekly grocery bill will be before she walks into Walmart.  

"I know when I go in the grocery store, I'm not leaving without spending $400.” 

The 32-year-old stay-at-home mom of five in Mount Airy, North Carolina, has watched that number climb steadily over the past few years.  Just about two years ago, she could feed her family of seven for $200 a week easily.  Now the cost has doubled. The family spends about $1,600 on groceries a month, more than their $850 rent. 

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Though Aviles had been noticing higher prices throughout the year, she says the past two to three months felt especially steep.  They’ve quit soda. Aviles recalled that her family used to get two 12-packs for $5 or $6, but “they never run those sales anymore. Now it’s about $5 or $6 for just one pack.” 

It’s not just Aviles who feels she’s walking out of the grocery store today with fewer items for the same amount of money. 

Her experience reflects a national reality. 

Rising grocery prices have placed a growing strain on American households. What was once a manageable part of the monthly budget has become a persistent financial burden, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and triggered double-digit price increases. 

USA TODAY has launched an interactive tool, enabling readers to explore grocery prices over time and across cities and even select specific items for a standardized shopping basket. 

Our shopping cart, powered by Bright Data, a data-scraping company, tracks real-time prices collected weekly from Walmart's online marketplace for at least one location in each state. The basket includes exact prices for specific items such as a pound of ground beef, Marketside 12-count cage-free brown eggs, Great Value white bread, and other staples. 

Pick a city, select items you purchase regularly, add them to a virtual cart, and see how prices shift week by week. 

According to Ricky Volpe, professor of agribusiness at California Polytechnic State University, Walmart's prices are typically 10% to 20% lower than traditional supermarkets such as Kroger, Albertsons or Publix at the individual product level.  

With more than 4,000 locations across the nation, "Walmart is actually a pretty good way of tracking what's actually going on with the rate of change in grocery prices," Volpe said.  

Unlike conventional grocery stores, which rely heavily on promotional sales and weekly circulars, he said, Walmart maintains relatively consistent markups on products. 

“Walmart has promotions, but they don't play that game anywhere near the same level like Kroger, Albertson, Stop & Shop and Publix do,” Volpe said. 

That steady pricing strategy could explain why USA TODAY’s price basket, based on Walmart data, showed a slight decline for some cities on certain products in recent weeks, even though overall national grocery prices rose.  

If you don't see our graphic, click here.

Double-digit inflation for groceries

Food costs were a major concern in the last presidential election as voters ranked them among their top issues. In 2022, inflation peaked at 9%, and food prices rose even higher, reaching a 13% increase for groceries consumed at home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 

Although inflation has since eased, American shoppers are still paying nearly 30% more for groceries compared with six years ago, according to the grocery price index from Datasembly, a data firm tracking retail pricing.

The index monitors weekly pricing fluctuations across more than 150,000 stores and 200 retailers spanning over 30,000 ZIP codes nationwide. USA TODAY modified the index numbers to show the percentage change in product prices compared with the first week of October 2019. 

Protein prices spike

Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to bring grocery prices down, consumers like Daniel Petcash haven’t seen much relief at the checkout, especially when he buys protein like beef and eggs in bulk − items that experienced shortages and price surges over the past several months. 

The 25-year-old former college basketball player and now sports nutrition coach knows exactly how much eggs cost in 2022 and today. 

Why? 

Petcash eats six eggs every morning and a pound of beef almost every night.  

Every 10 days, he walks into his local Aldi in St. Petersburg, Florida, and loads his cart with six to 12 cartons of eggs and 8 to 9 pounds of ground beef.  

Petcash said he remembers vividly that eggs were only $1.12 or $1.13 a dozen three years ago. That price jumped to $5 a dozen earlier in 2025 because of the avian flu outbreak and is now down to about $2 a dozen. 

He has since switched from pasture-raised eggs to conventional eggs to save some money. He also gives up the convenience of premade microwaveable rice and finds himself dining out less. 

“Everything's either stayed about the same or increased in price,” Petcash said. 

'Only work a job to pay for groceries'

Autumn Robeson has a full-time job as a phlebotomist in Wichita Falls, Texas. But she doesn't work to pay the mortgage or cover utilities. Her entire paycheck goes to one thing: feeding her family of five. 

"I actually only work a job to pay for groceries, because my husband pays all the bills," said the 34-year-old mother of three. "I literally just work to pay for groceries." 

Historically, economists paid little attention to grocery prices in monetary policy decisions, viewing them as a small fraction of household budgets when incomes were rising broadly. 

That calculus has shifted as income growth has slowed and wealth has concentrated among higher earners, making food costs increasingly burdensome for many families. 

When economists talk about rising wages in recent years offsetting inflation, they're not talking about everyone.  

The Federal Reserve Bank's data on wage growth shows all earning groups experienced increases during and after the pandemic, peaking right before summer 2023. But those gains were distributed unevenly. The lowest-paid workers now experience the slowest wage growth as labor demand has eased. 

For many families, most of the wage increases were quickly swallowed by rising costs for groceries, housing and child care. 

Robeson's monthly grocery bill has tripled since before the pandemic from $400 a month to roughly $1,200 now − just a few hundred dollars less than their monthly mortgage payment. 

“It’s crazy that food is almost as expensive as housing,” said Robeson, who shops mainly at Walmart every two weeks and spends about $600 per trip. 

She said nearly every item she buys has gone up.  

To save money, Robeson now opts for store-brand products instead of name brands, including for microwavable pastries. “I stopped buying the original Hot Pocket brand, and I will get the Great Value one because it’s $3 cheaper," she said. "My daughter can’t really tell the difference.” 

But even store brands have jumped a bit: The Great Value soda that used to be $2.50 for a 12-pack is now about $5. 

Her grocery bills surprise her: “Sometimes I think it’s going to be $300 at checkout, and it’s $500. It kind of happens almost every time.” 

Turning shopping hauls into cash  

The family’s grocery bill has climbed so high that Robeson started documenting her shopping trips on social media and has gained thousands of followers on TikTok. So did Aviles, the mom of five in North Carolina. 

Known as "Mama J Rae,” Aviles shows her overflowing shopping cart, the deals she finds, and the dinner she'll cook that night. Her videos went viral as grocery prices surged, drawing hundreds of comments with questions about how much she spent and how she could afford it, and suggestions of cheaper brands or money-saving tips. Aviles now has more than 1 million followers on TikTok and earns money from her content through brand partnerships and viewer engagements. That helps pay for the groceries she films. 

"I unfortunately don't have control over the price of things," Aviles said. "But I do have control over my income and what I can do about that." 

Will grocery prices ever go down? 

None of the shoppers interviewed by USA TODAY were optimistic prices would fall anytime soon. Robeson even worried about how long her family could keep up. “If groceries get any higher, we can’t afford day care. So I have to stay home, and then we can’t afford groceries."  

Experts would agree that it’s unlikely grocery prices will return to their previous levels. Instead, they continue to rise, but more slowly than in 2022.  

According to the latest federal data, food prices increased 3.1% in September from the previous year. That number could climb further if the estimation that new tariff policies would inflate prices comes true or if climate-related events, such as widespread droughts, disrupt the supply of beef and other staples. Bird flu outbreaks also pose a threat to egg prices, especially as bird migration season begins.  

Last year, drought conditions affected all 50 states for the first time in decades, forcing farmers to sell off cattle and creating a beef supply crunch. Similar weather patterns in Brazil drove up coffee prices.  

The impact of new tariffs from the Trump administration on imported goods remains uncertain, but the recent “big jump” in food prices indicated by the federal consumer price index could be a sign. 

"Many economists, myself included, see that as sort of the initial visible impact of the tariff situation, as well as some extreme weather conditions that are affecting commodity prices," said Volpe, the agribusiness professor. 

Joseph Balagtas, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, said his team at the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability noticed food inflation has pushed Americans to change how they shop.  

“We’ve seen some economizing,” Balagtas said. “Moving to store brands, moving to cheaper cuts of meat, chicken instead of beef, looking for coupons, and making more frequent shopping trips.”