The Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner

Each fall, the Farm Bureau publishes its annual estimate of what it costs to serve a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner in the United States.[i] For 2025, the price of a meal for a family of 10 is $55.18, which marks a 5% decline from last year. After hitting a record high of $64.05 in 2022, the Farm Bureau’s estimate has now fallen for three years in a row.

Figure 1

How can the price of a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner be lower this year? The simple answer is that many of the key items on the table cost less than they did last season. According to the Farm Bureau, the average price of a 16-pound turkey has dropped by $1.34 from last year, bringing the total down to $21.50—a notable 16.3% decline. Several other staples have followed the same pattern: cubed stuffing mix is down about 9%, two frozen pie crusts are slightly cheaper at 0.8% lower, a dozen dinner rolls are down 14.6%, and even a 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries has edged down by 2.8%. There are still a handful of items that increased in price, but the broad declines across most components help pull the total cost down overall. (Figure 2).

Figure 2

How Does Portland Compare?

How does the cost of Thanksgiving Dinner stack up in the Portland–Vancouver area? Looking across the selected metros where Datasembly[ii] provides grocery price data and the Bureau of Economic Analysis[iii] publishes Regional Price Parity estimates, Portland actually falls on the more affordable end of the list. A typical Thanksgiving Dinner here is estimated at about $47.50, well below the national average of $55.18 and far under the higher-cost markets like San Francisco, Seattle, or Los Angeles. Given that Portland’s median household income is about 10% higher than the U.S. average, paying roughly 14% less than the national cost for a full Thanksgiving meal offers even more relief for local households.

Figure 3