Beef Pricing, 2023–2026: The Squeeze Is in the Middle of the Chain

If you have bought a steak or a pound of ground beef this year, you already know prices are high. The headline is everywhere: beef is at record levels, the national cattle herd is the smallest it has been in seven decades, and a flesh-eating parasite the United States eradicated sixty years ago was just confirmed in a South Texas calf less than a hundred miles from where I sit.

What the headlines miss is that "beef is expensive" is not one story. It is at least three, and they are not moving together. The price a rancher receives for a calf, the price a packer pays for a finished steer, the price you pay for a box of brisket or a combo of lean trim, and the price a shopper pays at the grocery case have risen at wildly different rates over the past three years. For a business that buys beef as a raw material — a BBQ restaurant buying briskets and primals by the case, a sausage or jerky maker buying lean trim by the bin, a prepared-foods manufacturer building beef into a finished SKU — the gap between those numbers is the difference between a manageable cost increase and a margin event.

This article does three things: it traces where beef prices have actually been since 2023, it explains why the increases landed so unevenly across the supply chain — and squarely on the people who buy beef to make a living — and it lays out where prices are likely to go now that the screwworm has changed the math.

The Run-Up: Three Years, One Direction

The current run started in late 2022 and has not meaningfully paused since. Overall, beef prices are up roughly 57 percent since 2020. The cause is not a single weather event or a temporary disruption. It is the accumulated result of a decade-long cattle cycle colliding with drought, high interest rates, and elevated production costs.

Start with the herd. As of the USDA's January 2026 inventory, the total U.S. cattle herd stood at roughly 86.2 million head — the smallest count since 1951. The beef cow herd, the breeding females that determine future supply, had fallen to about 27.6 million head, the lowest since 1961. This is the sixth consecutive year of contraction. Years of drought dried up pasture and forced ranchers to sell breeding stock; high feed and freight costs made holding cattle expensive; and interest rates north of 7 percent meant carrying animals through a dry season was a financing decision as much as an operational one.

Fewer cattle means less beef. Through the first months of 2026, fed-cattle slaughter was down close to 10 percent year over year, and — importantly for anyone making ground product — lean grinding beef has been the single tightest part of the market, because the older cows that supply it are exactly the animals ranchers liquidated during the drought. Feedlots partially offset the shortage by feeding animals longer, pushing average slaughter weights past 1,460 pounds, but heavier carcasses cannot replace missing head count.

The prices followed. Live (fed) cattle traded around $180 per hundredweight in 2023. By April 2026, live cattle futures broke $250 for the first time in history, with cash trade in the $230s; full-year forecasts run in the $250–$265 range. Retail told a quieter version of the same story: all-fresh beef sat near $7.60 a pound through much of 2023, and ground beef, which was $5.50–$5.80 a pound in early 2025, crossed $6.70 a pound nationally by early 2026.

And yet demand barely flinched. U.S. beef consumption was about 28.6 billion pounds in 2025 and is projected to slip only around 2 percent in 2026. Customers kept buying beef at record prices even with cheaper pork and poultry on the same shelf and the same menu. That resilience is the engine underneath everything that follows: when demand holds while supply shrinks, price has only one direction to go.

The Asymmetry: The Price You Pay vs. the Price You Can Charge

Here is the part the grocery-aisle coverage misses, and the part that matters most if beef is your raw material. The increases did not move through the supply chain evenly. They were front-loaded onto the producer end and heavily compressed by the time they reached the consumer. Measured from the start of the run in 2022 through late 2025, the price changes by position in the chain looked like this.

Read that ladder from top to bottom and the story is unmistakable. The rancher selling calves saw prices more than double. The shopper buying beef at retail saw an increase of roughly a fifth. Someone absorbed the difference — and if you buy beef to cook it or to manufacture with it, that someone is you.

Put yourself in the buyer's seat. The beef you purchase is priced off the wholesale market — the cutout, the specific primals, the trim — and that number is up roughly 59 percent. Some of the cuts you depend on have moved more than the average; lean grinding beef, the raw material behind ground products, sausage, and jerky, has been the tightest segment of all. Meanwhile, what your own customer will pay — the diner reading your menu, the grocery or foodservice buyer of your finished product — is anchored to the retail world, where beef rose only about 21 percent. You are buying in the producer's market and selling into the consumer's market. That gap is the squeeze, and it is structural, not temporary.

You are not alone in the vise. Packers — who buy live cattle and sell wholesale beef — spent most of this run with deeply negative margins, clawing back to roughly breakeven only in early 2026. Their problem is instructive rather than comforting: it shows the cost increase compounding fastest in the middle of the chain, exactly where a restaurant or a processor sits.

It's Not the Cow, It's the Cut

Everything to this point has been about the animal and the chain — live cattle, the boxed-beef cutout, the retail case. But you don't buy a steer, and you don't buy "the cutout." The cutout is a blended average of every primal on the carcass, and nobody's purchase order looks like the average. A barbecue operation buys brisket. A burger, sausage, or jerky maker buys lean trim. Those are two narrow, specific markets — and neither one tracks the headline number you read in the news.

Take brisket. As a raw primal off the carcass, it's actually one of the cheaper parts of the animal — USDA's boxed-beef report recently put the brisket primal at roughly $2.59 to $2.73 a pound, well under the rib (about $5.16–$5.89) or the loin ($4.33–$4.73). But almost nobody buys the bare primal. By the time it's a trimmed, fabricated packer brisket delivered to a restaurant, the wholesale price runs closer to $3.76 a pound, and at retail the national average sits near $4.50, ranging from $2.50 to $8.00 by grade. Brisket is also volatile: restaurant wholesale prices swung from $4.84 in December 2022 to $3.67 that January and back to $4.71 in February. The reason a once-throwaway working cut now prices like a middle meat is pure demand — smoked brisket went from a Texas regional dish to a national staple, and that demand doesn't ease just because the cutout dips.

Now the other raw material: lean trim. If you grind, you live and die by 90CL — beef that's 90% lean — typically blended with 50CL fat trim to land a standard 73–75% lean burger or sausage. That's its own global market, and it has gone vertical. The imported 90CL benchmark into the U.S. reached about $3.80 a pound in March 2026, up 22% year over year from roughly $3.12 the prior March; the Australian grinding-beef indicator behind it climbed from around A$7.60/kg in early 2024 to a record north of A$13/kg by late 2025. The driver is structural scarcity — U.S. fed slaughter is down roughly 10%, the herd is at a seventy-year low, and lean grinding beef is the tightest segment of the entire complex. American grinders can't cover demand at home, so they lean on imports, and 2026 U.S. beef imports are forecast up about 22% versus 2024. Lean trim tracks live cattle almost one-for-one — a correlation around 0.91 — so it inherits every cattle-price spike and then stacks a scarcity premium on top.

Put the two raw materials next to the average, and the point is hard to miss:

So when a headline says beef is up some single-digit or low-double-digit percentage, that's the blended average talking. The cut your business actually depends on has its own curve — and for the two raw materials this audience cares about most, brisket and lean trim, that curve has run hotter than the average. That's no accident: it's exactly where demand is concentrated and where substitution is hardest. If you build your costs and your pricing off the general "price of beef," you're working from the wrong number. Track the specific cut you buy.

The Screwworm: Why the Forecast Just Got Worse

Into that already-tight market arrived the New World screwworm. It is a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals — cattle, wildlife, pets, and in rare cases humans. The U.S. eradicated it decades ago; the last domestic case before this year was in 1966. It is not a food-safety threat: infected animals are identified and treated, and the parasite poses essentially no risk through the meat supply. Its danger is economic, and it runs through cattle supply, not the dinner plate.

The timeline matters. Mexico confirmed a case in November 2024. The USDA closed the southern border to live cattle imports, reopened it in February 2025, then closed it again that May as detections moved north; a planned phased reopening was halted in July, and the border has stayed shut to Mexican cattle since. On June 3–4, 2026, the USDA confirmed the first U.S. case in sixty years — a three-week-old calf in La Pryor, in Zavala County. Texas's cattle industry alone is worth roughly $15 billion.

The mechanism that matters for the price you pay is the border closure, not the single Texas case. In a normal year the U.S. imports 1.1 to 1.2 million head of cattle from Mexico — mostly feeder animals bound for U.S. feedlots — and 2023 and 2024 ran higher, around 1.25 million head each. With the border closed, that supply evaporated. One analysis put Mexican feeder imports down roughly 60 percent year over year — 197,844 head in 2025 against 493,300 over the same period in 2024; the American Farm Bureau counted 795,000 fewer head over a ten-month stretch. Those are animals that would have been fed, finished, and slaughtered in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Southern Plains. Their absence is why feedlots in cattle country are sitting half-empty, and why Mexico — rather than ship calves north — has begun building its own feedlots and packing capacity, with beef exports to the U.S. up 23 percent in the first four months of 2026.

The screwworm did not cause the beef-price run. The herd contraction did that. But it removed the one near-term release valve — imported feeder cattle — that could have eased the squeeze while the domestic herd rebuilds. It is an accelerant on a fire that was already burning.

Where Prices Go From Here

No one calls the cattle market to the dollar, but the structural forces line up clearly enough to put both a direction and some numbers on the next two years.

The supply side cannot recover quickly, and the recovery is self-limiting. Rebuilding a herd means holding back heifers for breeding instead of sending them to slaughter — which tightens near-term supply further before it loosens. A cow bred today produces a calf that reaches slaughter weight roughly two years later. USDA projections have inventory bottoming in 2025 and climbing only gradually, not recovering toward about 91.6 million head until 2034. Record cattle prices are projected for 2026, with high retail prices expected to persist for several years, and most analysts do not expect "normal" beef prices before 2028 at the earliest.

Here is the base case. Through 2026, expect fed cattle to hold in roughly the $250–$265 per hundredweight range and feeder cattle around $380–$415 — at or near the records set this spring — with ground beef staying north of $6.70 a pound and the broader beef complex elevated. 2027 stays high: even under a clean recovery, the herd cannot expand fast enough to deliver real relief. The earliest a move back toward "normal" pricing looks realistic is 2028, and full inventory recovery — toward roughly 91.6 million head — is a 2034 story. In one line: sideways-to-up through 2026, still high through 2027, and no structural relief until the back half of the decade.

The risks around that base case are asymmetric, and they run mostly through a single variable — the screwworm:

For a business that buys beef, the planning assumption should be simple: high and volatile input costs are the operating environment for at least the next 18 to 24 months, with more risk to the upside than the downside.

What This Means If You Buy Beef

None of this is actionable as a macro story. It becomes actionable when you translate it into your own cost structure. A few things every restaurant or meat-product maker buying beef should be doing right now.

The businesses that come through a commodity shock like this in good shape are rarely the ones that guessed the price right. They are the ones who knew their exposure to the decimal, priced from the number that actually hit their cost, and had the customer conversations before the damage showed up on a financial statement.