Observed inflation. Modeled wing prices. Historical wing prices use the national restaurant-price index anchored to WingMath’s expanded menu sample. They are estimates, not surveyed national wing averages. See the Wingonomics ↓
Annual averages through 2025. Saved September 15, 2026 · 2026 is still in progress.
U.S. inflation · 2025+2.6%All-items CPI · annual average YoY
Estimated price of one wing$1.61National restaurant-price proxy +3.7% vs. prior year
Inflation cost in wings+1.6Extra wings per prior-year $100 Using 2025’s estimated price
Wing-adjusted inflation-1.0%YoY change in basket cost in wings Uses modeled wing prices
The Long View
Inflation, two currencies.
The complete annual figures are in the table below.
Choose a year above, or tap the chart to inspect it.
A basket costing $100 in 2024 costs $102.63 in 2025. The extra cost is worth 1.6 wings at the estimated 2025 price of $1.61 each. After repricing both years in their own wings, the basket takes 1.0% fewer wings. The 2025 averages use 11 published months.
The Annual Record
Every year. Every denominator.
Prices are dollars per restaurant wing piece. Every wing-price value and wing-based result is modeled.
Annual averages, 1980–2025. Inflation cost is measured per $100 spent in the previous year. The constant basket cost $100 in 1980.
Year
U.S. CPI YoY
Est. price per wing
Est. wing-price YoY
Inflation cost in wings / $100
Constant basket in wings
Wing-adjusted inflation
2025 uses 11 published months. October 2025 is unavailable in both source series; it is not interpolated. All other years use 12 months. The 1979 values supply the year-over-year comparison for 1980.
The Wing Standard
Same economy. A different unit of account.
01
Inflation in wing values
First, measure U.S. inflation from the annual average all-items CPI. If a basket cost $100 last year, a 5% inflation rate adds $5 this year. Divide that extra cost by this year’s estimated wing price to express the increase in wings.
Inflation cost in wings = ($100 × CPI inflation rate) ÷ this year’s wing price
The rate in this formula is a decimal: 5% = 0.05. A dollar rate becomes a wing quantity only after choosing a dollar amount. We use $100 of prior-year spending consistently.
02
Estimate a wing each year
The estimated national restaurant-price trend uses BLS Food Away from Home CPI. The dollar level is anchored to WingMath’s September 15, 2026 menu sample: the active database benchmark per wing, with equal weight per menu. The matching price-index anchor is August 2026, the latest released month, at 397.868.
Estimated wing price = current WingMath benchmark × (year’s restaurant-price index ÷ 397.868)
A wing means one menu-listed bone-in piece. We assume wings follow the broad restaurant-price trend and that August’s index is a suitable anchor for the September menu snapshot. The model does not capture wing-specific supply shocks, changing portion sizes, or promotions. Raw wholesale wings priced by the pound are a different product.
03
Restate inflation in wings
Price the same consumer basket in each year’s wings, then compare it with the prior year. The percentage change is wing-adjusted inflation. Positive means the basket takes more wings; negative means it takes fewer, even if its dollar cost has risen.
Rates inside the ratio are decimals. This is the exact relative-price calculation, not CPI inflation divided by a dollar wing price. With this model, it compares all-items inflation with restaurant-price inflation; it is not an independent measured wing inflation series.
What “estimated national price” means here
The national index supplies the historical trend. The expanded menu sample supplies a provisional dollar starting point. Neither provides a representative national average price for wings. There is no validated annual restaurant-wing-price survey in this dataset, so every historical wing price is labeled as a model estimate. No statistical confidence interval is claimed.
Changing the dollar anchor rescales estimated prices and wing quantities. It does not change wing-adjusted inflation, because the anchor cancels in the year-over-year ratio. This model also makes estimated wing-price inflation equal to the national Food Away from Home index’s annual change.
Annual timing and the constant basket
We calculate each annual index as the arithmetic mean of available monthly, not seasonally adjusted observations, then compute its change from the prior annual average. These are annual-average changes, not December-to-December rates. Calculations retain unrounded values; display values are rounded.
The constant consumer basket is normalized to $100 in 1980. Its modeled dollar cost in year t is $100 × CPI(t) ÷ CPI(1980), and its wing cost is that amount divided by the estimated wing price for year t. This CPI-scaled basket is a purchasing-power illustration, not a claim that CPI follows an unchanged physical shopping list across 46 years.
The 2025 averages use the same 11 available months in both series. The annual record ends in 2025; no partial 2026 year is presented as a completed annual average. This is a saved research snapshot and does not refresh automatically.
Sources retrieved September 15, 2026. CPI observations are published statistics; the wing-price reconstruction and wing conversions are WingMath calculations.