Visualized: Grocery Price Inflation by President

How We Compiled the Grocery Price Inflation Data

This chart compares the cumulative change in U.S. grocery prices during each presidential term over roughly the past 20 years. Rather than using the overall Consumer Price Index or the broader food category, we used the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for “Food at Home.” This is the CPI category designed to measure changes in the prices consumers pay for groceries purchased for consumption at home.

The specific data series is CPI for All Urban Consumers: Food at Home in U.S. City Average — Series CUUR0000SAF11. It is published monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is expressed as an index with 1982–1984 equal to 100.

For each presidential term, we compared the Food-at-Home CPI at the beginning of the term with the index at the end of the corresponding four-year period. Because CPI is reported monthly rather than daily, January observations are used as the closest consistent measurement to presidential inaugurations.

The calculation for each term is:

Grocery price increase = (Ending CPI ÷ Beginning CPI − 1) × 100

This produces a cumulative price increase, not an average annual inflation rate. For example, a 20% bar means that the BLS grocery basket cost approximately 20% more at the end of that four-year period than it did at the beginning. It does not mean grocery inflation averaged 20% per year.

The chart treats each four-year presidential term separately. Accordingly, Barack Obama’s first and second terms are shown individually rather than combining his eight years in office. Donald Trump’s first term, Joe Biden’s term, and George W. Bush’s applicable term are handled the same way.

For Donald Trump’s second term, the comparison is necessarily different because the term is still underway. We use January 2025 as the starting observation and the latest available BLS Food-at-Home CPI, currently June 2026. The index increased from 310.936 in January 2025 to 321.631 in June 2026, which equals an approximately 3.4% cumulative increase in grocery prices through June 2026. This bar should therefore be clearly marked as “partial term” and should not be interpreted as a completed four-year result.

We use the not-seasonally-adjusted series for the cumulative term comparisons. This is appropriate for comparing actual consumer price levels across longer periods and avoids mixing the chart with short-term seasonal adjustments commonly used to analyze month-to-month inflation.

It is also important to distinguish grocery price levels from the inflation rate. Inflation describes how quickly prices are changing; this chart measures how much the overall grocery price level increased during a president’s term. Prices can therefore remain substantially higher even after the annual inflation rate falls. For example, BLS reported that food-at-home prices were still rising 2.7% year-over-year as of June 2026.

Finally, this graphic should not be interpreted as saying that a president personally caused every price increase shown during his administration. Grocery prices are affected by numerous factors—including agricultural commodity prices, energy and transportation costs, labor costs, weather, disease outbreaks, supply-chain disruptions, international events, monetary and fiscal conditions, and government policies. The chart is intended to answer the narrower factual question: How much did the average U.S. grocery price level change while each president was in office?

Soures

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Consumer Price Index (CPI)
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ BLS/FRED — CPI for All Urban Consumers: Food at Home in U.S. City Average, Series CUUR0000SAF11
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SAF11 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — FRED historical data for Food at Home CPI
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SAF11 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — June 2026 CPI Summary
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Detailed CPI Table 2, including Food at Home
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm USDA Economic Research Service — Food Price Outlook
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook BLS Public Data Series reference for Food at Home
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SAF11