The complaint is now universal enough to be a genre: fast food is not cheap any more. The data behind that feeling is real. Across most developed markets, restaurant menu prices have risen faster than headline consumer inflation for several years running, and the structure of the industry explains why.
Why labour dominates the cost base
A quick-service restaurant is not really a food business in its cost structure. Food and packaging typically account for around a third of revenue; labour and occupancy take a comparable or larger share between them. That makes the sector unusually exposed to two things that have moved sharply: wage floors and commercial rents.
Fast food also employs disproportionately at or near the statutory minimum wage. When a minimum wage rises, most industries feel it at the margin; quick-service restaurants feel it across the majority of their hours. There is very little room to absorb it, and the board price is the release valve.
What the official indices show
National statistics agencies publish separate index lines for eating out, and in most developed markets those lines have run ahead of the headline rate since 2021. The pattern is consistent enough across countries that it is clearly structural rather than a local policy story.
Where to check this yourself
The relevant series are "Food away from home" in the US CPI (Bureau of Labor Statistics) and "Restaurants and hotels" in the UK CPI (Office for National Statistics). Both publish monthly and both are free. We link them in the sources below rather than quoting a figure, because these numbers move every month and a stale figure is worse than none.
What chains did instead of raising headline prices
Chains are extremely reluctant to raise the prices customers use as reference points - the cheeseburger, the small coffee, the entry combo. Those are the numbers people remember and complain about. So the adjustment happened in less visible places.
| Tactic | What it looks like on the board | Visible in our data? |
|---|---|---|
| Shrinking the value range | Fewer items under the psychological price line | Yes - Value ranges are thin on most menus we hold |
| Moving discounts into the app | Board price holds; real price only in-app | No - App-only pricing is not published |
| Widening the size ladder | A new, larger, higher-priced tier appears | Yes - Size options are stored per item |
| Charging for what was free | Sauces, dips and extras become line items | Yes - 1,405 side and extra items across our menus |
| Withdrawing published prices | "Price varies" replaces a number | Yes - 1,596 items carry no published price |
That last row is the one worth dwelling on. Roughly one item in ten across our database has no published price attached to it. Some of that is genuine variation between franchisees. Some of it is a decision not to publish, and it has the convenient side effect of making price movements harder for anyone to track.
The migration of the discount
The single clearest consumer-visible change is where the discount now lives. A decade ago the deal was on the board, available to everyone who walked in. Increasingly it is in the app, available to people who have installed it, logged in and accepted the data trade.
The board price is now the list price. The app price is the real one.
This is rational for the chain: it converts a blanket discount into a targeted one, and it buys customer data. For the customer it means the printed menu increasingly overstates what a regular actually pays - And understates what an occasional visitor pays relative to them. We cover the mechanics in apps and loyalty programmes.
What this means for the prices on this site
We publish national reference prices from published menus. In an environment where real pricing is drifting into apps, that has a specific and worth-stating limitation: our figures represent what a walk-in customer pays without an app, which is increasingly the most expensive way to buy. Treat them as an upper bound for a regular and a fair estimate for a visitor.
It is also why we timestamp everything and keep the local currency figure as the stored value. If you want to see how a market's whole board sits today, the country pages carry the cheapest, average and dearest item for every brand we track there.
