About Cattle Auction Prices

Cattle prices from 214 USDA-reported auction barns in 28 states, 39 video auctions and 14 direct-trade regions, sorted by weight and updated every day.

Where the prices come from

Every price is from USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Market News: the auction, video/internet auction and direct trade reports that USDA market reporters publish after each sale, read through USDA's public MyMarketNews API. National fed cattle and boxed beef come from the USDA LMR DataMart. Each page names the USDA report it uses (for example AMS_2204) and links to it. We do not collect prices from barns ourselves, take bids or run sales; check with the barn before you haul.

How prices are averaged

• Which cattle: feeder steers and heifers, Medium and Large frame, muscle grade No. 1 and 1–2, regular lots, priced per hundredweight. Value-added, unweaned and No. 2 lots get their own columns; fancy, fleshy, thin and replacement lots are left out.
• Weight bands: 100-lb bands by average weight (500–599 lb is a "5-weight"), averaged by head count.
• Barns with several sale days get one page; barns whose USDA reports are mostly unweaned calves headline unweaned prices and say so.
• Weekly trends compare the 4-week with the 13-week average. The label describes recent prices; it is not a forecast.
• The seasonal pattern compares each month with the 12 months around it, averaged over every year since 2019. Past patterns are not a forecast either.
• Direct trade headlines the freight basis (F.O.B. or delivered) that carried most cattle in each region, and the weights direct trade mostly carries.

How we check it

We recompute a sample of prices on every page from the raw USDA rows, and compare our statewide averages with USDA's own state weekly summaries (within $2/cwt in about 98% of weeks). Our 12-State Feeder Steer Index is our own calculation from USDA data; it is not the CME Feeder Cattle Index and is not affiliated with CME Group.

Not advice

Everything here is general market information. It is not trading, marketing, insurance or financial advice, and past prices do not predict future ones.