Grocery and restaurant prices in 2027 are forecast to rise 2.0 percent over the year, but the government economists who made the call attach a forecast interval running from a 2.7 percent decline to a 7.0 percent increase. That range is the real content of the forecast. A midpoint of 2.0 percent describes the center of a spread almost ten percentage points wide, and the agency publishing it is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
What the September 25 Food Price Outlook says for 2027
The figures sit in the summary findings of ERS’s Food Price Outlook, updated September 25, 2026. The agency’s wording is direct: in 2027, prices for all food are forecast to increase 2.0 percent, with a forecast interval of minus 2.7 to 7.0 percent. “All food” is ERS’s umbrella category, covering both groceries bought in stores and meals bought away from home, and the percentages are changes in consumer price index categories, not retail dollar prices. ERS publishes no per-pound or per-dozen price in this release.
Two further 2027 lines sit underneath the headline number. Food-at-home, the grocery-store portion, is forecast to rise 1.8 percent, with an interval of minus 5.0 to 9.2 percent. Food-away-from-home, covering restaurants and other meals bought out, is forecast to rise 2.6 percent, with an interval of 0.2 to 5.1 percent. The grocery interval is the widest of the three, spanning 14.2 percentage points from its bottom to its top.
Reading a forecast interval that runs from minus 2.7 to 7.0 percent
An interval is ERS telling readers how far the realized figure could land from the midpoint. For all food in 2027, that distance is 9.7 percentage points from end to end. Under the agency’s own range, 2027 could bring prices that are slightly lower than 2026, or a year of price growth running above anything in the current-year outlook. The 2.0 percent is the central estimate and not a prediction that any single month, product or household will see that rate.
The contrast with the current year is stark. For 2026, the same page forecasts all-food prices up 2.9 percent, with an interval of just 2.5 to 3.2 percent, a spread of 0.7 points. The 2027 interval is roughly fourteen times wider. ERS does not spell out the reason in the summary findings, but the two ranges sit side by side on the same page, and they show how much less certain a year-ahead forecast is than a forecast for a year that has largely been recorded.
Not the first look at 2027
The September update is not ERS’s first 2027 forecast. On its Food Price Outlook landing page, ERS states that it forecasts the annual percentage change in food prices for the current year and, beginning in July each year, for the following year. The 2027 numbers have therefore been part of the outlook since the summer update, and the September 25 version is the one currently posted. Each monthly update can move the midpoint and the interval, so the 2.0 percent and the range from minus 2.7 to 7.0 percent belong to the September 25 vintage specifically.
The page lists three ERS contacts for the outlook: Hayden Stewart, Diansheng Dong and Wilson Sinclair. The release is a data product rather than a statement from any one official, and the figures above are ERS’s own rather than a news outlet’s reading of them.
The 2026 baseline: all food up 2.9 percent, beef up 9.4 percent, eggs down 29.4 percent
The 2027 forecast follows a 2026 outlook that is far from uniform across the grocery aisle. ERS forecasts food-at-home prices up 2.4 percent in 2026, with an interval of 1.8 to 3.0 percent, and food-away-from-home up 3.5 percent, with an interval of 3.3 to 3.8 percent. Beef and veal are forecast up 9.4 percent for the year, with an interval of 7.4 to 11.6 percent. Eggs are forecast down 29.4 percent, with an interval of minus 32.9 to minus 25.2 percent.
Those are forecasts for all of calendar 2026, not what beef or eggs have done so far. The measured results through August are lower in both cases: beef and veal prices were 5.9 percent higher in August 2026 than in August 2025, after falling 0.6 percent from July to August, and egg prices were 23.0 percent lower than a year earlier, after rising 3.5 percent from July to August.
What the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded in August
The forecasts rest on consumer price index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In its August 2026 consumer price index release, published September 11, food at home was unchanged on the month at 0.0 percent and up 2.2 percent over twelve months. Food away from home rose 0.3 percent on the month and 3.4 percent over twelve months.
Set against those readings, the 2027 forecast of 1.8 percent for groceries sits slightly below the 2.2 percent twelve-month figure BLS measured through August, and the 2.6 percent forecast for food away from home sits below the 3.4 percent measured over the same stretch. Both comparisons are between a forecast for all of 2027 and a measured year-over-year change, so they are directional rather than exact.
The September 25 outlook, then, offers three things at once: a 2.0 percent central forecast for 2027 food prices, a range from minus 2.7 to 7.0 percent that runs to both sides of zero, and a 2026 estimate of 2.9 percent that ERS is holding with far less room for error. The agency’s own interval, and not the midpoint alone, is the number to carry forward from the Food Price Outlook.
Food prices are one line in the household cost budget
A year-ahead food price forecast with a range as wide as the one in the September 25 Food Price Outlook says how uncertain next year’s grocery budget is, and says nothing about the other bills that a household also carries. Property-tax relief, heating and cooling help and home-repair programs sit on separate application calendars from anything ERS publishes.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is an 11-page kit with the 5 kinds of property-tax relief, the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters, and an application log and renewal calendar for keeping those deadlines in order.
Line up the home-cost deadlines that no food forecast covers →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the forecast figures were checked against the USDA Economic Research Service Food Price Outlook and the BLS August CPI release.
