Coffee inflation: what a pound cost then versus now

A pound of ground roast coffee cost $3.208 in January 1980 and $9.317 in July 2026, an increase of 190.4 percent in nominal terms. Those are published observations of Bureau of Labor Statistics series APU0000717311, US city average, not seasonally adjusted (BLS). Most of that move is recent: the price is up 123.2 percent since January 2020 alone, and 10.7 percent in the last twelve months.

January price, decade by decade

Published values of APU0000717311 from the BLS Average Price Data file ap.data.3.Food, fetched 2026-08-18. Percentages are arithmetic.

Coffee did not rise steadily, and 1990 is the proof

The most useful row in that table is 1990, where a pound cost less than it did in 1980. Nominal coffee prices fell across the eighties and then climbed, which is why "coffee has always gone up" is wrong and why any single start year can be chosen to tell a story. The honest summary is that coffee spent decades roughly flat in nominal terms and then more than doubled between 2020 and 2026.

These are nominal dollars. The series is a price, not an inflation-adjusted price, so a comparison across 46 years is measuring general inflation and coffee-specific moves together. Comparing coffee to other groceries in the same file separates the two better than adjusting by a general index does.

Coffee against two other things in the same BLS file

All three series come from the same BLS Average Price Data file fetched 2026-08-18. The milk row starts in July 1995 because that is the first observation BLS publishes for that series, so it is not comparable to the 1980 start of the other two rows. Shown that way rather than silently rebased.

What the number does not tell you

The series tracks 100 percent ground roast coffee in all package sizes at US retail. It excludes whole bean, instant, decaf, capsules and anything a specialty roaster sells, and it is a city average rather than any real shelf. It also has publication gaps, including October 2025 and most of 2018 and 2019, so charts of it break in places where nothing happened to prices. And the record high in the published data is April 2026 at $9.723, not the latest month.

Related reading

• Coffee price statistics 2026
• What a cup of drip coffee costs to make at home
• The coffee price tracker

FAQ

How much has coffee gone up in price? A pound of ground roast coffee went from $3.208 in January 1980 to $9.317 in July 2026, up 190.4 percent in nominal terms. Since January 2020 it is up 123.2 percent.

Is coffee more expensive than it has ever been? Not quite. The highest month in the published BLS series is April 2026 at $9.723 a pound, above the July 2026 reading of $9.317.

Are these prices adjusted for inflation? No. They are nominal published prices from the BLS Average Price Data series, so a long comparison includes general inflation as well as coffee-specific moves.

Sources: all prices are published observations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Average Price Data file ap.data.3.Food, fetched and cached 2026-08-18, for series APU0000717311 (coffee, 100 percent, ground roast, all sizes, per lb), APU0000715211 (sugar, white, all sizes, per lb) and APU0000709112 (milk, fresh, whole, fortified, per gal), all US city average and not seasonally adjusted. Series page for coffee: data.bls.gov. Percentage changes are arithmetic from those published values.