A pound of butter cost $3.96 at the average American grocery store in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two Septembers ago it was $5.00. Eggs fell even harder: $2.27 a dozen last month, down from a record $6.23 in March 2025. Those two numbers quietly rewrote the homemade vs store-bought pie argument for this Thanksgiving, and the comparisons still ranking on Google are running on 2024 prices. Rerun with this fall’s numbers, the math says something I didn’t expect. Baking from scratch still doesn’t beat Costco on price. What it beats now is the halfway option most of us reach for in November, the can of filling plus a box of refrigerated crust.
The 2026 butter crash made the from-scratch crust the cheap part of the pie
The crust is where the price shift lands hardest. A standard single all-butter crust uses one stick of butter and about a cup and a quarter of flour. At September’s BLS average prices ($3.959 a pound for butter, 54.5 cents a pound for flour), that’s 99 cents of butter and 19 cents of flour. Call it $1.18 for a crust you rolled yourself.
The shortcut costs more. A two-pack of Pillsbury refrigerated pie crusts is $3.82 at Walmart right now, which works out to $1.91 per crust, or 62% more than the homemade version. The 2024 budget-baking guides treated butter as the splurge and the boxed crust as the thrifty compromise. With the BLS butter index down 8.3% over the year to August, the compromise now costs more than the splurge.
It also isn’t the same crust. Pillsbury’s own ingredient list names the fat as “lard and hydrogenated lard,” with no butter anywhere in it. So you aren’t buying a cheaper butter crust in a box. You’re buying a lard crust for 73 cents more than the butter one would have cost you.
Butter is cheap because farms are swimming in cream, and the USDA expects that to fade
The explanation is surprisingly literal. American dairy cows are producing milk with record butterfat content, which Ever.Ag analyst Katie Burgess has credited to advances in cattle genetics and nutrition, and all that extra cream ends up as butter. The USDA’s September supply forecast put the 2026 wholesale butter price at $1.595 a pound, down from $2.22 in 2025. Grocery ads followed: the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service tracked an average advertised price of $3.74 for a pound of butter across 12,824 stores in mid-September, against $4.20 a year earlier. In the Midwest, sale butter averaged $2.95.
Eggs took a different road to the same place. The bird flu outbreaks that pushed a dozen past $6 in early 2025 eased, and the BLS average has stayed between $2.14 and $2.27 every month since April. Two eggs in a pumpkin pie now cost 38 cents.
The same USDA forecast has wholesale butter creeping back to $1.625 a pound in 2027. I’d treat the current price as a sale with an end date. If you bake a lot in December, a few extra pounds in the freezer this month is the one stock-up move I’d make.
The homemade vs store-bought pie math comes out to $4.87 at home and 50 cents a slice at Costco
I priced the classic recipe printed on the Libby’s can, which makes one 9-inch deep-dish pie and calls itself eight servings. The filling comes to $1.97 for the 15-ounce can of Libby’s pumpkin and $1.00 for a 12-ounce can of Great Value evaporated milk (both current Walmart prices), plus 34 cents for three-quarters of a cup of sugar (about a third of a pound at $1.019) and 38 cents for two eggs. That’s $3.69 of filling. Add the $1.18 butter crust and the whole pie costs $4.87, about 61 cents a slice. I left out the cinnamon, ginger and cloves, since most of us already have them.
Run the same pie at March 2025 prices and it costs $5.74, because the eggs alone were $1.04 and the butter was $1.20. That’s 87 cents more, roughly 15%, for an identical pie. Swap the Pillsbury crust into today’s pie and you land at $5.60. In other words, the shortcut version of the 2026 pie costs about what the full from-scratch pie cost at the peak of the egg crisis.
Then there’s the warehouse option. Costco’s Kirkland pumpkin pie came back on August 24 at $5.99 for 58 ounces, and it comfortably feeds 12. That’s 50 cents a slice, so Costco still wins on pure price per serving by about 11 cents. Look at where the money goes in the homemade pie, though. The canned pumpkin is the single biggest line at $1.97, more than the butter and eggs put together. The ingredients everyone was panicking about two winters ago are now the cheap part.
If you bake this year, bake for the butter crust and skip the box
My position, which I expect some of you to argue with: if you’re making pie to save money, stop. The Costco pie is cheaper per slice, it takes no oven space on the busiest cooking day of the year, and an honest from-scratch pie runs close to two hours once you count chilling the dough and the 55-to-65-minute bake. Buy the giant pie and spend that time on something you’d rather do.
If you’re making pie because a butter crust is the whole point, this is the cheapest it has been to do it properly since early 2022, when the BLS average last sat below this summer’s $3.82. The one choice that makes no sense in 2026 is the middle path, paying more for a lard crust in a box and then doing all the filling work yourself anyway.
The compromise I’ve settled on is to make the crust dough this weekend, while butter’s on sale, and freeze it as a flat disk so the fussiest step is done before Thanksgiving week. If you’re also planning the main event, our breakdown of fresh vs frozen turkey found a similar pattern, where the label people pay extra for isn’t the one that matters. And if your family is an apple pie family, start with the best apples for baking this fall, because the apple variety will change your pie more than any price swing.
The 11-cent question that should settle your Thanksgiving pie
Once the 2026 prices are in, the homemade vs store-bought pie decision comes down to one trade: is a real butter crust worth about 11 cents a slice and two hours of your week? With butter near its lowest price in four years, that has rarely been an easier yes. If your answer is still no, buy the Costco pie and leave the refrigerated dough in the dairy case.