Every dollar a shopper spends on beef is split five ways. Nothing here is a forecast and nothing here is a profit.
It is a snapshot of five markets running at once, not one animal's history.
This prices one animal at each of the five stages, using what USDA reported this week for cattle at that stage. A calf sold this week will not be fed cattle for the better part of a year, so these are the prices five different sets of cattle are fetching today — the right way to ask who is receiving what right now, and the wrong way to ask what any particular animal earned along the way.
A share is what a segment receives, not what it keeps. USDA publishes prices, not costs, for four of the five. So each link carries the break-even it has to clear — a number you can set your own against — and the one segment USDA does publish costs for, cow/calf, has them below in full.
Cow/calf covered its cash costs by $732 a cow and still lost $345 once its own labour and capital were charged for. That gap is mostly $570of unpaid labour — the rancher's own time, a real economic cost that never appears as a bill.
Quoting either figure alone misrepresents the sector: the cash number says the business works, the total number says it does not pay its owner. Both are USDA's.
| Per cow, 2025 | $ |
|---|---|
| Gross value of production | 1,417 |
| Operating costsfeed $445 of it | −686 |
| Allocated overheadincluding $570 of unpaid labour | −1,077 |
| Over operating coststhe cash answer | +732 |
| Over total coststhe economic answer | −345 |
| Converted to one calf sold | $ |
|---|---|
| Total cost carried by each calf sold | 3,387 |
| Less other cattle incomecull cows and yearlings, per calf sold | −668 |
| What a calf must bring to break evenon full costs, including unpaid labour | 2,718 |
| Primal | Share of carcass | Pounds on this one |
|---|---|---|
| Chuck | 29.62% | 296 |
| Round | 22.32% | 223 |
| Loin | 21.26% | 213 |
| Rib | 11.40% | 114 |
| Plate | 7.10% | 71 |
| Brisket | 4.95% | 50 |
| Flank | 3.35% | 34 |
| Total | 100.00% | 1,000 lb |
Weighting retail prices by how widely a cut is advertised would say a carcass is mostly ribeye, which it is not. USDA never publishes a cutting table — but its cutout is a weighted composite of the primals, and it publishes both the cutout and every primal value. Solve for the weights across 142 days and the carcass falls out.
Derived from boxed beef data, recomputed at build time rather than hardcoded, so it stays true if USDA changes the composite.
| Cut | Wholesale $/lb | Advertised $/lb | Difference | Store ads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top sirloin, boneless | 5.18 | 10.66 | +106% | 740 |
| Tri-tip roast | 4.45 | 9.06 | +104% | 281 |
| Flank steak | 7.92 | 12.99 | +64% | 758 |
| Short ribs | 5.85 | 9.15 | +56% | 1,690 |
| Strip steak, boneless | 9.60 | 14.29 | +49% | 6,228 |
| Ribeye, boneless | 14.20 | 20.49 | +44% | 1,272 |
| Eye of round | 4.37 | 6.13 | +40% | 1,499 |
| Ribeye, bone-in | 12.62 | 12.74 | +1% | 967 |
Where a primal becomes two kinds of retail cut — chuck into roasts and ground beef, loin into loin and sirloin — the pounds are split evenly between them. That split is an assumption, but a measured one: moving it from all-roast to all-ground shifts the retailer's share only between 48.4% and 45.3%, so unlike the yield above it does not decide the answer.
Trim and bone are lost between a subprimal and the cut in the case. Ground beef is absent because it comes from trimmings and is not one of the 42 items USDA prices wholesale.
A 550 lb calf at $388.41/cwt, a 750 lb yearling at $337.47/cwt, a 1,556 lb fed steer at $227.68/cwt live, and a 1,000 lb carcass at $389.93/cwt plus $14.40/cwt of hide and offal.
Feeder week of Aug 17; fed cattle Aug 17, head-weighted across every line USDA filed on the live negotiated basis, because it files more than one and picking either would be arbitrary. Live and dressed prices are never averaged together. Nothing is adjusted for inflation.
Related: feeder prices, fed cattle, boxed beef and what the label is worth. Source: USDA AMS and ERS. This site is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the USDA.