Ground Coffee Hit a Record Price Nationally in April. Here’s Where It Stands Now for Kentuckians
You scoop out your morning coffee and try not to think about what the bag cost.
Ground coffee hit a record price this spring, and Kentuckians undoubtedly felt it at the register.
Here’s what you’re paying today based on national averages, and what might come next.
Note: This is general information, not financial advice. Prices and government statistics are subject to change.
Series Behind the Prices
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the government’s price tracker.
It follows ground coffee in a monthly series, and its $4.73 reading for August 2021 is our starting point.
The $9.30 reading for August 2026 comes from the same series, APU0000717311.
It tracks 100% ground roast coffee in all package sizes, priced per pound, as a U.S. city average.
BLS normally posts a reading every month.
It builds these averages from the price observations it collects for the consumer price index.
Your store may or may not be in that sample. So the figure can’t tell you what any single shelf tag says.
Two Jumps and a Plateau
The price rose in two jumps, with a long flat stretch in between.
The first jump took the average from $4.73 in August 2021 to $6.24 in August 2022.
That’s up 31.9%.
If you buy a pound a month, that first jump added about $18 a year.
Then came the flat stretch.
August 2023 came in at $6.09, and August 2024 at $6.31. That’s only 1.2% above the 2022 reading.
The second jump ran from August 2024 to August 2025. The average went from $6.31 to $8.87, or 40.6%.
If you buy a pound a month, that one year added about $31 to your coffee budget.
Since then the climb has slowed. August 2026 landed 4.8% above August 2025.
From that first August to the last, the price rose 96.8%, using the unrounded prices.
That’s nearly double.
What Counts as Double for Ground Coffee
Double the August 2021 average, $4.726 a pound, would be $9.452.
August 2026 came in at $9.299. That’s about 15 cents short of double.
Monthly averages did top $9.452 in each of the five months from February through June 2026.
July’s $9.317 and August’s $9.299 slipped back under it.
April Peak
April 2026 set the series’ highest reading, at $9.72 a pound, before adjusting for inflation.
That was 38.5% above the $7.02 average from January 2025.
As of August 2026, the average has fallen four months in a row, down to $9.30.
The drop from the peak is 42 cents a pound. Over twelve monthly pounds, that’s about $5.
Cooler, but not cheap.
If you’re waiting for August 2022’s $6.24 to come back, the price would have to fall 32.9% from here.
Back to 1980
Records in this series reach back to January 1980, when the average was $3.21 a pound.
In August 2021, you paid about the same as in January 2015, when the average was $4.74.
Before 2022, the highest published reading was $6.07, in November 2012.
The average passed that mark in July 2022, at $6.11.
It kept rising from there.
April 2026’s $9.72 beat the 2012 high by 60.3%, before adjusting for inflation.
If you shopped for ground coffee in January 2020, the average was $4.17 a pound.
So August 2026’s $9.30 is more than double the January 2020 average.
Psst! Want to see the rise month by month since January 2025? Sort and filter the ground coffee table below.
What the World Market Shows
Raw coffee has gotten cheaper on the world market, according to the July 2026 edition of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s twice-a-year Coffee: World Markets and Trade report.
Coffee prices dropped 25% over the previous seven months, measured by the International Coffee Organization’s monthly price index.
More supply became available.
The forecast for 2026/27 is a record 189.7 million bags of world production.
That’s up 10.8 million bags from the year before.
You’d expect that to show up on your shelf tag by now.
It has, but only partly.
The average price of ground coffee is down 4.4% from April, though the two measures cover different periods.
What Smucker Reports
Smucker, which sells Dunkin’ and Café Bustelo coffee, reported on August 26, 2026 that its U.S. retail coffee net sales rose 13% in the quarter ended July 31.
Higher pricing made up 10 percentage points of that gain.
Your wallet may recognize that.
Company-wide net sales are expected to fall 1% to 2% this fiscal year.
The dip is tied mainly to lower net pricing. The amount sold and the mix of products stay neutral.
In June, Bloomberg News reported that Smucker plans to lower coffee prices in 2027 as its green coffee costs fall.
Psst! How much do you know about coffee? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Coffee Pop Quiz
Answer these questions on coffee trees, bags, beans, and grocery prices. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
How did the Kentucky coffeetree get its name?
Limits of the Average
BLS cautions that its average prices show the price level in a given month.
The consumer price index measures price change.
About a quarter of the sample rotates each year.
A switch in stores or products can move an average even when the index would show no price change.
So the price at your store can sit above or below the national figure.
USDA's monthly food price outlook says retail coffee prices were 6.1% higher in August 2026 than in August 2025.
The ground coffee average rose 4.8% over the same stretch.
The two measures disagree on size but agree on direction.
A Lexington shop, High on Art and Coffee, told a local television station in February 2025 that it didn't plan to pass higher coffee costs on to customers.
North Lime Coffee and Donuts, the other shop in that report, said it expected to feel the effects of higher prices later.
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