American families are finding some relief this holiday season as the average cost of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner has decreased for the third year in a row.
The price for a “classic” holiday meal for ten people has dropped to $55.18 in 2025, down 5 percent from 2024.
This marks the lowest cost since 2021 and signals that targeted agricultural policy, supply chain reforms, and energy independence efforts may finally be easing burdens for working-class Americans.
The biggest drop in cost comes from the star of the table—turkey. A 16-pound bird saw a 16.3 percent price decline from 2024, contributing most significantly to the overall reduction in the total dinner cost.
While the wholesale price for fresh turkey is higher than last year, grocery stores are aggressively running Thanksgiving deals to draw shoppers back to turkey, resulting in lower retail prices for holiday birds.
Some retailers have even highlighted Thanksgiving baskets priced at under $4 per person by using store-brand substitutions and adjusted ingredient lists, reflecting broader efforts to keep meals affordable.
Federation president Zippy Duvall warned, however, that food costs remain a concern for many families.
He noted the loss of 15,000 family farms over the past year and pointed to historically low crop prices, high supply costs, and ongoing trade uncertainty as key challenges facing American agriculture.
Not every item on the table is cheaper. Frozen peas jumped 17.2 percent, sweet potatoes rose 37 percent, and a fresh vegetable tray spiked 61.3 percent from last year.
Even with those increases, markdowns on staples like stuffing and dinner rolls—driven by improved wheat prices and retailer incentives—bring the total cost lower overall.
This decline follows years when Thanksgiving dinners were roughly 13 percent more expensive than pre-pandemic levels during Trump’s first term. The latest numbers show a welcome shift toward stabilization.
The broader trend is unmistakable: costs are leveling out.
This reflects a renewed emphasis on market-driven solutions, agricultural revitalization, and energy policies designed to lower transportation and fertilizer expenses.
In contrast to the inflation and food price instability seen under Joe Biden, the current downward trend shows the impact of an administration prioritizing domestic production and deregulation.
From a political standpoint, the data speaks for itself. Strategic deregulation and economic pragmatism continue to outperform centralized, bureaucratic policymaking.
I came home from burying my wife of thirty-two years expecting silence, exhaustion, and grief — not a driveway full of motorcycles and the sound of power tools coming from inside my house. Still wearing my funeral suit and holding the folded flag from her service, I walked through the back door and prepared myself for the worst. My neighbors had already called authorities twice, and I assumed someone had taken advantage of my absence on the hardest day of my life. I was bracing for damage or theft — anything but what I actually found.
Inside my kitchen were not intruders destroying things, but a group of bikers repairing them. A team was installing new cabinets. Others were repainting my living room, fixing my porch, patching my roof. And sitting at the table, shaking and tear-stained, was my son — the son I hadn’t spoken to in eleven years. He stood when he saw me, explained that my late wife had secretly contacted him months earlier, and asked him to take care of me when she was gone. She had given him a detailed list of everything in the house that had fallen apart while I was caring for her, and his motorcycle club showed up to help him carry out her final request.
For three days, these men worked in shifts — fixing, painting, repairing, and making sure I ate. During those days, I reconciled with my son, met the daughter-in-law I never knew, and held my grandchildren for the first time. We cried, we apologized, we ate together on the newly repaired porch, and slowly my home started to look alive again. What I thought was the end of everything — the day I laid my wife to rest — became the day my family was handed back to me.
When the work was done, every biker came to shake my hand, not for thanks, but to remind me I was not alone anymore. My son’s club made me part of their extended family and organized a memorial ride to honor the woman whose last act was to stitch her husband and son back together. I lost my wife that week — but because of what she planned and what those bikers did, I didn’t lose myself. People talk about what bikers take. This time, they gave. They gave me a livable home, a repaired relationship, and a reason to keep showing up to my own life.