USDA figures put restaurant prices up 3.4% year over year and all food up 3.0%. Independent tracking of 76 chains puts fast food specifically at 4.2%, with McDonald’s at 5.1% and Chipotle at 6.2%.
Eating out is getting more expensive faster than eating in, and fast food is outrunning both.
The USDA Economic Research Service reports that food-away-from-home prices in June 2026 were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, while all food ran 3.0 percent higher.
Separate price tracking by GetFoodMenus, which monitors published menu prices across 76 chains, puts fast food specifically at 4.2 percent year over year for July.
Which fast food chains raised prices the most
The chain-by-chain spread is wider than the average suggests.
Per GetFoodMenus tracking: Chipotle up 6.2 percent, McDonald’s up 5.1 percent, Starbucks up 4.8 percent.
Taco Bell held increases under 2 percent. Burger King kept the $5 Your Way Meal at $5.
That is a gap of more than four points between the fastest riser and the slowest, inside the same category, in the same year.
What individual menu items now cost
The item-level numbers land harder than the percentages.
A Big Mac is listed at $5.99, up from $5.49 in 2024. The McChicken went from $2.49 to $3.59.
The Whopper moved from $4.99 to $5.49. Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme went from $4.99 to $6.89. Wendy’s Dave’s Single is $5.69, up from $5.19.
Prices vary by location, and delivery apps carry their own markup on top.
Why fast food prices keep climbing
The drivers are the ones the industry has named repeatedly: labor costs, commodity inflation, and supply chain adjustments.
Worth putting alongside the current numbers: a FinanceBuzz analysis of twelve major chains found average menu prices rose about 60 percent between 2014 and 2024, against roughly 31 percent general inflation over the same span.
So the 4.2 percent figure is a single year layered on top of a decade that already ran well ahead of everything else.
How to keep fast food costs down for a family
The chains have built the answer into their own apps, which is not an accident.
Value menus and app-exclusive deals are where the pricing actually holds. Taco Bell’s Luxe Value Menu keeps 13 items under $3. Wendy’s 4 for $4 persists. Burger King’s $5 meal has not moved.
For a family stopping on the way to a park or between flights, the difference between ordering off the board and ordering through the app is now large enough to plan around.
Which is the real change. Fast food used to be the cheap option by default, and now it is the cheap option conditionally.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
USDA Economic Research Service Food Price Outlook (July 2026), the food-away-from-home and all-food year-over-year figures incorporating June 2026 CPI data
GetFoodMenus (July and August 2026), the 4.2 percent fast food figure, the chain-by-chain breakdown, and the item-level pricing from its tracking of 76 chains
FinanceBuzz (2026), the ten-year analysis of twelve chains and the comparison against general inflation