Why your coffee costs so much right now

If your coffee habit feels more expensive than it used to, you’re not imagining it. The US government’s own price tracking shows it clearly.

See the latest numbers: our coffee price tracker charts this data every month since 1980 and updates automatically.

The number that tells the story

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the average price of a pound of ground roast coffee across US cities. It’s not the price of any particular bag; it’s an average across brands and package sizes, which makes it a good, steady way to measure the trend.

That average peaked in April 2026 at about $9.72 a pound, the highest on record. It has eased a little since, with readings around $9.30 in late summer, but it is still far above where it was a couple of years ago. In the 12 months to April, coffee prices in the consumer price index rose about 18.5%. By August, the yearly increase had slowed to around 6%.

In other words: prices stopped climbing so fast, but they didn’t come back down.

What pushed prices up

There’s no single villain. Several things hit at once.

Bad harvests in the biggest producing countries. Brazil grows more coffee than anyone, and Vietnam leads the world in robusta. Poor weather hurt crops in both, which tightened global supply of the green (unroasted) coffee that roasters buy.

Tariffs. Almost all coffee sold in the US is imported, because the mainland’s climate can’t grow it at scale. When import tariffs rose, that cost landed on roasters, and much of it was passed along to shoppers.

Markets amplifying the swings. Coffee is traded on futures markets, where prices react quickly to weather forecasts, crop reports and speculation. Those swings ripple out to the price roasters pay.

Why shelf prices are slow to fall

Futures prices for raw coffee have already dropped from their peaks as forecasts for Brazil and Vietnam improved, and the US Department of Agriculture has forecast a record global harvest for 2026–27. So why is your bag still pricey?

Because there’s a lag. Roasters often buy coffee months in advance on contracts, so the beans being roasted today may have been bought at last year’s higher prices. Retailers also tend to raise prices quickly and lower them slowly. If the bigger harvest arrives as forecast, shelf prices may drift down, but expect it to be gradual.

What about specialty coffee?

Specialty roasters, the ones selling single-origin bags with tasting notes on the label, were hit too, but differently. They often buy on longer, fixed-price contracts directly from importers or farms, so a spike in the futures market doesn’t hit them overnight, and a drop doesn’t help them overnight either. The median specialty bag was around $18.75 this fall.

Demand hasn’t flinched: in June 2026, a record 48% of US adults said they’d had a specialty coffee drink in the past day.

The longer-term worry

Even if prices cool, coffee has a bigger problem: climate. Arabica, the species behind most specialty coffee, is fussy. It likes stable temperatures and predictable rain, and warming temperatures, erratic rainfall and spreading pests all put the regions that grow it under pressure. That’s a story we’ll be following closely.

What we’re watching

• The monthly BLS coffee price, to see whether the slow drift down continues.
• Brazil’s next harvest, which sets the tone for the whole market.
• How new EU deforestation rules affect what farmers can sell, and to whom.

A note on numbers: different trackers report slightly different figures for the same month. We’ve used the BLS series where we could and rounded the rest; see the sources below.