The 2026 Thanksgiving Inflation Report
The cost of a Thanksgiving dinner is roughly flat this year, at $77 for a typical family vs $78.92 last year. Nick's data-driven take on America's biggest holiday, in Philly
TL;DR - I priced the City Controller's Thanksgiving basket myself, at seven Philadelphia-area grocery chains, on November 4. Buying name brand items, Thanksgiving dinner costs about $77.00, about the same as what the Philly Controller's office said in 2025 ($78.92). If you buy the store-brand stuff, you save about $10, for a cost of $67.39. Turkey prices are up a lot, but everything else is down year over year, netting to Thanksgiving dinner costing about the same or slightly less than last year.
Last year, I'd written briefly (and with frustration) about how silly it is for the Philly Controller's office to be spending $20,000 (my estimate) in time & money to produce its annual report on how much Thanksgiving dinner costs, when any AI tool can give that in seconds for fractions of a penny. See The City of Philadelphia Is Checking Turkey Prices Instead of Balancing Its Checkbook.
Rather than just complaining about it, this year, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and prove my point - in two ways.
First, I just asked ChatGPT, "How much more expensive is thanksgiving dinner in Philly vs a year ago, using a constant basket of goods. Be quantitative." After thinking for about 2 minutes and doing a bunch of web scraping, it answered about 2.27%. Total cost of doing this: about $0.01 in AI tokens and 2 minutes of my time.
Second, I actually figured I'd do the actual ground work - look at real grocery store prices.
Earlier this month, I'd started playing with AI bots to shop for me to help me save money (e.g., my goal is to buy super cheap flights to do a Christmas vacation for my family to Mexico for under $500, all-in). The tool I'd built to do this was great at going to websites and pulling price info, so I started using it for our own grocery shopping.
And it occurred to me - I could use this same bot to actually do the work that I said the Controller's office should not be doing as it's a waste of public money. So I launched my bot army to actually "go to" a bunch of grocery stores to figure out how much a Thanksgiving dinner costs right now. Obviously, my bots didn't have legs, so they either looked at the grocery stores' apps, websites or even phoned customer service departments to ask using their generated voices.
All in all it cost me about $5 in AI tokens and a couple of hours of my time making sure the data wasn't garbage in, garbage out. The Controller's thanksgiving basket includes 11 items, and so I took those same 11 items across a bunch of grocery stores, looking at both name-brand and store-brand items... From Libby's pie mix to the white-label version of stuff.
At the name-brand price, Thanksgiving dinner costs $77.00, whereas at the store-brand price, about $67.39. Versus the Controller's 2025 price tag of $78.92, it's about flat vs last year and 14.6% cheaper. Said another way, Thanksgiving dinner is somewhere between 0-15% cheaper this year than last.
We should be thanking our lucky stars this Thanksgiving, since many other things are hella more expensive. The average price for a gallon of regular gas is $4.17 right now, up 37% year on year.
Turkey got 11.7% more expensive in Philly, and 8% more nationally
A 16-pound Butterball was between $31.84 to $39.84, depending on the store. That is up 11.7% versus the Controller's number of $32.80 from 2025.
The same happened nationally. According to the BLS, the retail index for uncooked poultry including turkey is up 8.0% in 2026.
Aside from turkey, everything else got a bit cheaper for your Thanksgiving dinner
Strip out the turkey and the other ten items total $40.36 versus $46.12, down 12.5%. That being said, stuffing is up 47% (but it's a small total dollar amount). More details in the table below.
| Item | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 name brand | 2026 store brand | YoY (name brand vs 2025) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turkey 16 lb | $27.04 | $32.80 | $31.84 – $39.84 | $31.58 | 11.7% |
| Whole Milk | $4.92 | $4.13 | $2.13 – $5.79 | $4.23 | 2.4% |
| Pumpkin Pie Mix | $3.89 | $5.82 | $3.99 – $5.82 | $4.87 | 16.3% |
| Whipping Cream | $3.66 | $6.44 | $2.17 – $6.36 | $3.32 | 39.9% |
| Cubed Stuffing 12 oz | $3.50 | $3.32 | $3.00 – $6.58 | $2.63 | 47.0% |
| Green Peas 1 lb | $2.82 | $2.53 | $1.06 – $3.49 | $2.05 | 14.6% |
| Dinner Rolls 12 | $4.09 | $5.03 | $2.99 – $6.44 | $3.77 | 12.7% |
| Sweet Potatoes 3 lb | $2.96 | $4.39 | $1.95 – $5.99 | $3.06 | 30.3% |
| Fresh Cranberries 12 oz | $2.32 | $2.14 | $0.75 – $2.50 | $2.09 | 2.3% |
| Pie Shells | $5.42 | $5.82 | $1.24 – $7.49 | $3.53 | 21.8% |
| Misc / Relish Tray | $5.98 | $6.50 | $3.78 – $7.98 | $6.26 | 3.7% |
| Total (family of ten) | $66.60 | $78.92 | $54.90 – $98.28 (mid $77.00) | $67.39 | 2.4% |
BLS says the categories behind those lines barely moved - potatoes up 1.4% on the index, pies and tarts down 0.5% - so the fall in the Philly prices is not the same product getting cheaper, it is a different shelf getting counted: the dearest pint of cream I found in Philadelphia on November 4 was $6.49, about what the Controller counted last November.
For context, food at home - the CPI line for groceries - is up about 28% since 2020 and has run between 1% and 5% a year since 2021, apart from 2022's 11.4% spike. A holiday basket that has gone sideways since last November is the good news, not the whole story.
Over fifty years the holiday basket has been the cheap part of food inflation, at 2.8% a year
A basket that cost $17.05 in 1974 cost $66.60 in 2024, according to the Controller's November 2024 release - a 291% increase across fifty years, or about 2.8% a year compounded, slower than headline CPI at 3.8% and food at home at 3.4% over the same stretch.
And just for fun, since I'm coming off the candy sugar high. Candy is ~84% more expensive than in 2020
A 100-piece bulk Halloween candy bag cost $9.19 in 2020 and, by 2025, it was $16.39, a 78% increase, per a FinanceBuzz analysis of supermarket ad prices, and it has not come back down since. In October 2026 International Business Times put this year's bag at $16.96, another 3.5% increase YoY (not too crazy to be honest).
Notes and Sources
The 2024 and 2025 basket line items come from the Philadelphia City Controller's annual Thanksgiving reports: the November 2024 release ($66.60) and the November 2025 release ($78.92). The 2026 column is mine - seven Philadelphia-area chains (Acme Markets, Aldi, The Fresh Grocer, Lidl, ShopRite, Trader Joe's, Wegmans) on Nov 4, 2026, at two shelves, averaged across chains. Where a chain has more than one local store I averaged across them: Wegmans (seven stores), The Fresh Grocer (seven), ShopRite (four). Trader Joe's was its Arch Street store, Acme's prices are the same everywhere in its 34-store Philadelphia area, and Aldi and Lidl price nationally. The Controller never says which stores or which products it priced, which is why the name-brand tier is the one to compare against. The turkey cross-checks against the American Farm Bureau's November 2025 release and its year-over-year table. The line-item indexes are BLS series (CUUR0000SEFF02 for turkey, CUUR0000SAF11 for food at home, and seven more for the other line items) pulled from the BLS public API on Nov 4, 2026. The candy bag figures are from FinanceBuzz ($9.19 in 2020, $16.39 in 2025) and International Business Times ($16.96 in 2026).
What I left out, and why. Whole Foods Center City stocks no conventional gallon of milk and no mainstream two-count pie crust, only cornbread stuffing mix and an organic pie mix, so four of the eleven lines have no comparable product there. The Stop & Shop platform serves Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia, a specialty cheese shop. Trader Joe's had no whole turkey on the shelf on Nov 4 and sells its dinner rolls by weight rather than in a 12-count pack. Aldi's only whole-turkey prices came through an Instacart storefront as estimates. The Fresh Grocer does not carry fresh cranberries at all this season. Line coverage varies with the shelf: the pie mix line is three chains (Fresh Grocer, ShopRite and Wegmans), the turkey line five, and every other line six or seven.
Two limitations. October 2025 CPI was never published during the federal appropriations lapse, so the 2025 food-at-home average spans 11 months and 2026 spans January through September, with no interpolation. And the gasoline figure is the national average for regular unleaded from AAA, $4.1694 a gallon as of Nov 2, 2026, against $3.0361 a year earlier.