It’s the guilty pleasure road trip meal: a visit to McDonald’s. You know it will be (relatively) consistent and delivered quickly. However, the pricing isn’t consistent. It can be all over the map, literally. In different places across the country, you’ll pay more for that Big Mac, arguably America’s most famous burger. CashNetUSA used McDonald’s app to manually collect prices from 460 different locations across the country (three restaurants in the three biggest cities in each state and Washington, D.C.)—that intern deserves a raise—and average them to create a list of the cities where you can buy the cheapest and most expensive Big Macs. You’ll laugh: when I googled exactly what’s in a Big Mac to share with readers who aren’t familiar, a little commercial jingle from yesteryear started playing in my head: it’s “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickled onions on a sesame seed bun.” That special sauce is similar to Thousand Island dressing, and it should be noted that the bun is in three components.
You can bite down on the most expensive Big Mac in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, you’ll pay $7.29. And that’s not including the fries and shake. Prices have risen 141.4 percent for McDonald’s between 2019 and 2024, as reported by Newsweek, and the company has this year seen the steepest drop in sales in five years, as reported by People yesterday.
Next is Missoula, Montana, where the same burger costs $7.25, followed by Seattle, Washington, where it costs $7.06. Those are pretty negligible differences, but when you jump to the back to the line and look at the cheapest Big Mac, it’s a little startling. The cheapest Big Mac is nearly three dollars less!
When you consider that in Austin, Texas, you’ll only pay $4.36, you wonder what drives the prices up in the other cities. Is it sourcing the lettuce (rumors say that the lettuce is actually the most expensive part of the burger, due to its short shelf life and the cost of transporting it)? Is it high rents for the restaurant itself? We’ll have to—no pun intended—chew that over.
The next least expensive Big Mac is also in Texas: Houston. There, you’ll pay $4.52. And in Huntington, West Virginia, you’ll pay $4.59.
Here are the most expensive Big Macs in the U.S.:
1. Santa Fe, New Mexico: $7.29
2. Missoula, Montana: $7.25
3. Seattle, Washington: $7.06
4. Springfield, Massachusetts: $6.96
5. San Diego, California: $6.86
6. Tucson, Arizona: $6.82
7. Boston, Massachusetts: $6.72
8. Buffalo, New York: $6.72
9. South Burlington, Vermont: $6.69
10. San Francisco, California: $6.66
Here are the cheapest Big Macs in the U.S.:
1. Austin,Texas: $4.36
2. Houston, Texas: $4.52
3. Huntington, West Virginia: $4.59
4. Saint Paul, Minnesota: $4.62
5. Fort Worth, Texas: $4.66
6. Springfield, Missouri: $4.76
7. Casper, Wyoming: $4.79
8. Gulfport, Mississippi: $4.79
9. Charleston, West Virginia: $4.82
10. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: $4.86