How Much Beef Cost In The '60s Vs 2026

If you've bought beef at your local grocery store recently, you may have suffered some sticker shock. The price has gone up 20% since just last year, and with various issues — like a screwworm outbreak at the southern U.S. border — it's likely to get even higher. It makes you long for a time when beef was a lot less expensive, like in the 1960s. But were things really that much cheaper? Sure, you could get a lobster dinner for about $2.50 during that decade, but the prices actually wasn't all that low once we take inflation into account. The same goes for beef.

Let's look at what you'd pay for a pound of beef almost exactly 60 years ago. An ad in The Bellingham Herald, from Washington state, featured ground beef for the low, low price of 49 cents a pound. Yes, that sounds like quite a deal, but that's before it's been adjusted for inflation. Once we've done that, the equivalent cost would be $5.07. Not quite as fabulous a deal, but considering that the current average price of ground beef is $6.75 a pound in the U.S., it is indeed cheaper. How about steak?

In 1963, you could get porterhouse steak for around 89 cents per pound, depending on where you lived. While that sounds jaw-droppingly cheap, once it's been adjusted for inflation, it's not quite such a good deal. It's the equivalent of $9.81 a pound today. Still, with this style of steak currently going for anywhere from about $12.80 to $28.26 for a grass-fed direct-to-consumer one, it was definitely a better deal back in the day. Groceries were a lot cheaper in the 1960s.

Now, if you wanted a steak dinner at a restaurant, you'd obviously pay a bit more. For instance, a steak dinner at Sir Steak in Little Falls, New Jersey (per an ad in The Herald-News) would have set you back a mere $2.25 (around $21 today). Considering the average steak dinner today is about $40 on the low end, it was still a steal. While beef was cheaper 60 years ago, as you can see, it wasn't quite as cheap as those prices at first seem. But with all the various pressures on the beef industry today pushing prices higher, in just a few years, we may wistfully look back to 2026 and wish we could get a steak for that price.