What a Big Mac® costs at a typical US McDonald’s, from the chain’s own ordering system, restaurant by restaurant. This is a store-level price tracker, not a currency index.
This is not The Economist’s Big Mac Index. That series compares currencies with a purchasing-power-parity basket across countries. The page you are on uses pickup prices we collect from US McDonald’s restaurants, and it stays inside the United States. The two share a search query. They do not share a method, a geography, or a publisher.
The Economist’s original is at economist.com/big-mac-index, and it is the one to read if you came here for the exchange-rate story rather than for what a Big Mac costs down the road.
As of 26 September 2026 · 12,235 restaurants priced · 49 states and D.C. · median of what each restaurant charges for pickup.
The national median Big Mac®, priced at 12,235 restaurants. The middle 80% of those restaurants charge between $5.19 and $7.19, a spread of 39%. The cheapest and most expensive ends are single restaurants and are named separately below, because they are a good fact and a bad average.
The same map as the rest of the site, opened on the Big Mac. Each pin is one McDonald’s. Green is cheap for the brand, red is expensive. Zoom, or tap Cheapest near me.
One number, on purpose. For each US McDonald’s we have priced, we take the pickup price of the sandwich the menu lists as a Big Mac — the name folded so Big Mac and Big Mac® count as one product, and so a Big Mac bun or a sauce cup cannot. The index is the median of those restaurant prices, not the mean, so one airport or theme-park till cannot move the headline. Placeholders McDonald’s uses when a restaurant does not sell the item ($99.99, a cent) are dropped before any figure is computed.
That is the whole method. There is no exchange rate, no basket of goods, and no adjustment for local wages. A restaurant in Manhattan and a restaurant in Kansas City are compared on the dollar amount the ordering system quotes, because that is the number a person pays.
McDonald’s still lists the sandwich as a Big Mac on the menus we read. Companion items below use the same exact-name rule and the same median, so a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is not mixed with a Deluxe, a Bacon Quarter Pounder, or the shorter “Quarter Pounder w/Cheese” listing that appears at a minority of restaurants.
| Item | Median | Typical range | Restaurants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac® | $5.99 | $5.19–$7.19 | 12,235 |
| Quarter Pounder® with Cheese | $5.99 | $5.29–$6.99 | 12,234 |
| McDouble® | $2.79 | $2.50–$2.99 | 12,234 |
| Cheeseburger | $2.49 | $1.99–$2.89 | 12,235 |
Typical range is the middle 80% when the sample is wide enough, otherwise the full range of the restaurants we priced. Item pages carry the nutrition panel and a “near me” lookup; this page is the national index.
Each bar is how many of the 12,235 restaurants charge that price. The gold bar holds the median. The chart is cut at the 95th percentile so one outlier cannot flatten everyone else into two bars.
Point at a bar — or tap one — to read how many restaurants charge that price.
The cheapest Big Mac in the sample is $2.99 in Fountain Valley, CA. The most expensive is $9.50 in Anchorage, AK. Both are single restaurants. About half the price variation we measure happens between restaurants inside the same state, which is why the headline is a national median of restaurants, not a state average.
Each point is the median across the restaurants priced that day. It can step when coverage grows, which is a fact about the sample, not a price change at a restaurant you already knew. Same-restaurant moves are counted on the price-changes page.
| Date | National median | Restaurants |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-20 | $5.89 | 12,228 |
| 2026-09-21 | $5.89 | 12,228 |
| 2026-09-22 | $5.89 | 12,228 |
| 2026-09-23 | $5.89 | 12,230 |
| 2026-09-24 | $5.89 | 12,230 |
| 2026-09-25 | $5.89 | 12,238 |
| 2026-09-26 | $5.99 | 12,235 |
State medians hide about half the story: a Big Mac already moves inside California alone. Of the 50 states with at least three priced restaurants, a typical one in Texas is $4.99 and a typical one in Montana is $7.75. The table is every qualifying state, cheapest first, so a ranking can be checked rather than asserted from the four at each end.
| State | Median | Restaurants |
|---|---|---|
| Texas | $4.99 | 1,068 |
| Wyoming | $5.19 | 10 |
| Oklahoma | $5.29 | 163 |
| Louisiana | $5.29 | 190 |
| Alabama | $5.49 | 177 |
| Indiana | $5.49 | 346 |
| North Carolina | $5.49 | 433 |
| Tennessee | $5.59 | 333 |
| Missouri | $5.59 | 289 |
| Mississippi | $5.59 | 103 |
| West Virginia | $5.59 | 93 |
| Ohio | $5.69 | 603 |
| Iowa | $5.69 | 104 |
| Wisconsin | $5.69 | 268 |
| Minnesota | $5.79 | 190 |
| South Carolina | $5.79 | 216 |
| Arkansas | $5.79 | 131 |
| Utah | $5.79 | 108 |
| Idaho | $5.79 | 49 |
| Kentucky | $5.89 | 248 |
| Georgia | $5.89 | 403 |
| Illinois | $5.99 | 607 |
| Florida | $5.99 | 833 |
| Kansas | $6.09 | 117 |
| New Mexico | $6.09 | 64 |
| Nebraska | $6.19 | 60 |
| Michigan | $6.19 | 486 |
| South Dakota | $6.19 | 17 |
| Oregon | $6.25 | 132 |
| Virginia | $6.29 | 332 |
| Colorado | $6.29 | 180 |
| North Dakota | $6.29 | 16 |
| Delaware | $6.30 | 39 |
| Pennsylvania | $6.39 | 454 |
| Nevada | $6.49 | 75 |
| Washington | $6.54 | 196 |
| Maryland | $6.59 | 273 |
| District of Columbia | $6.64 | 56 |
| California | $6.89 | 1,119 |
| Rhode Island | $6.89 | 28 |
| New York | $6.99 | 545 |
| New Jersey | $6.99 | 252 |
| Hawaii | $6.99 | 62 |
| Maine | $6.99 | 49 |
| Vermont | $6.99 | 13 |
| New Hampshire | $6.99 | 49 |
| Massachusetts | $7.19 | 366 |
| Arizona | $7.29 | 254 |
| Alaska | $7.50 | 19 |
| Montana | $7.75 | 17 |
A state with three restaurants is on this list because that is the floor for a median that is not one till. It is still a thin sample for that state.
What this page gives away is the national picture: medians, the middle 80%, state summaries, and the named extremes. The file you can download is the same idea in a spreadsheet — one week of national aggregates, one row per item per day. It is not the store-level archive.
The sample columns are date, item, median price, and restaurant count. There is no store id, no address, and no city. Those columns are the product: Hobby will add history across every priced chain, Pro will add the restaurant row. Neither is for sale yet. The waitlist on the data page is how you hear about launch — no sales call, and this site does not run ads against the index.
It does not say a Big Mac “should” cost $5.99. It says that is what a typical US restaurant in this collection charges. It does not cover delivery, combos, tax, or countries outside the United States. It does not replace the Big Mac item page, which has the nutrition panel and a lookup for restaurants near you, or the price map, which plots every dot.
McDonald’s menu prices are also on the full menu and the McDonald’s hub. Rankings that compare chains without pretending a Big Mac is a Whopper live on cheapest fast food and which chain is cheapest.