The median price for a pint of beer in Manhattan has climbed to $9.16, making it the first and only major city in the U.S. to surpass the $9 mark, according to data collected by Toast. The national median inched up 1.9 percent year-over-year to $6.52, per the report.
Costs inflated most drastically in Philadelphia, Nashville, and Washington, D.C., with a 3 percent or more hike in each zone. Boston came in as the second-most expensive city for beer, where the most frequent price is creeping toward the $9 threshold at $8.69
Conversely, San Antonio is the cheapest American city for beer at a median of $5.99, marking a 0.4 percent decrease from 2025. The Texas city was the only one to record a drop in the most common price. The two other most price-stable cities were Atlanta, with a subtle 0.03 percent growth, and Brooklyn — Toast isolated the borough’s data from Manhattan — where prices rose by 0.4 percent.
Expanding the data from cities to state-by-state shows Hawaii has the highest median beer price in the U.S. at $8.00, and trailing it are New York ($7.97) and California ($7.96). Prices jumped the most year-over-year in New Mexico with a 4.8 percent increase, South Carolina at 4.2 percent, and Montana at 4 percent.
Week by week, beer consumption peaks on Saturdays. Looking at the whole year, May was the most popular month for beer consumption with 10 percent higher sales than the annual median, and February was the category’s weakest month, with sales dipping 16 percent below the year’s most frequent price.
Toast is a popular POS and management system with presence at all types of vendors in the service industry. From March 2025 to 2026, Toast collected data from tens of thousands of full-service restaurants and bars nationwide for the report.
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