The Cheapest Fast Food in America

Every item on the menu at Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, Domino's, McDonald's, Papa John's, Popeyes, Taco Bell, and Wendy's, priced at 50,346 restaurants from the chains’ own ordering systems and ranked by what a typical restaurant charges. The cheapest thing you can order and eat is Chips Ahoy!® Cookie Pieces at McDonald's, a median of $0.50.

The 25 cheapest things you can order

One row per item, priced at a typical restaurant. Sauces, components and family packs are excluded — otherwise the cheapest fast food in America is a ketchup packet, which is true and useless.

The cheapest actual meals

The list above is the literal answer, and it is full of cookies and side salads. This one holds only items substantial enough to be a meal on their own — the same test used across this site, and our judgement rather than anyone’s official definition.

The most calories for your money

Cheapest is not the same as most food for the money. Ranked by calories per dollar, the order changes completely — and this is a measure of bulk, not of nutrition. The healthiest fast food ranks the opposite way.

The same item, a different price down the road

A national median hides how much one item moves between restaurants. Ranked by the gap across the middle 80% of restaurants — the ordinary range, with the outliers at both ends left out on purpose, because the very cheapest and very dearest restaurant in the country is usually a single airport or theme park.

The extremes are worth naming separately: the widest single gap on this page runs from $0.20 to $9.99 for the same Hash Brown*. Both ends are one restaurant.

How this is worked out

Prices come from each chain’s own ordering system, for pickup rather than delivery, collected across 50,346 restaurants and refreshed on a weekly cycle. Every figure above is a median, so one unusual restaurant cannot move it. What an item costs where you are is a different question, and the price map answers it restaurant by restaurant.

Chain against chain is a separate page: the chains sell different food, so comparing them fairly needs one identical product rather than an average of two different menus. Which fast food chain is cheapest uses a sealed bottle of water for that. Where the cheapest restaurant of each chain actually is — and which of them is near you — is cheapest fast food near you. The cheapest restaurant for a meal you build, not a brand index, is cheapest for your order. What a Big Mac costs across McDonald’s, as a national median rather than a cheapest-item ranking, is the US Big Mac Index.