The Weekly National Chicken Report, published by USDA Agricultural Marketing Service as report 3646, is the reference price sheet for the US wholesale chicken market. A monthly companion (report 3649) aggregates the same series. Unlike the beef and pork daily reports, which are built from mandatory price reporting by large packers, the national chicken series is compiled by USDA market reporters from trading in the wholesale broiler market, published weekly. That difference in cadence matters: chicken price discovery a buyer can see in public data moves in weekly steps, not daily ticks.
The report covers whole birds and the major parts, quoted FOB plant, fresh, for conventionally raised product. FOB plant means the price is at the packer's dock before freight, the same convention the beef and pork reports use, so a delivered chicken cost always runs above the printed number by the freight lane.
The parts table
The parts section is where a working buyer spends their time. The major lines are boneless skinless breast, line run breast, breast with ribs, tenders, whole wings, boneless skinless thigh meat, bone-in thighs, bone-in legs, drumsticks, and leg quarters. Each line carries a weighted average price in cents per pound plus the traded range for the week.
The table naturally splits into a white meat complex and a dark meat complex, and the two halves trade on different demand engines. Boneless skinless breast, tenders, and wings respond to domestic retail and foodservice programs. Leg quarters and the bone-in dark meat lines clear heavily through export channels. It is entirely normal for the two halves of the table to move in opposite directions in the same week, which is why "chicken was up" is not a sentence a buyer can act on. The question is always which line.
The composite
USDA also publishes a national composite weighted average, a single number that rolls the whole bird and parts trade into one weekly value. The composite is useful the way the beef cutout is useful: as a one-line direction check on the whole complex. It is not a price anyone transacts. A breast buyer whose line fell can sit inside a week where the composite rose because leg quarters and wings did the lifting.
Reading it against the rest of the meat case
Chicken holds a distinct position in the retail meat case: it is usually the cheapest mainstream protein per pound, which makes it the default landing spot for retail feature activity when beef and pork run expensive. When the breast lines run cheap relative to their own history, retailers load features onto chicken, and that pulls consumer traffic toward the poultry case and away from beef and pork pull-through. A beef or pork buyer reads the chicken report for exactly that reason: not to buy chicken, but to see where the retailer's ad page is likely to go next, because the ad page steers the demand their own cuts depend on.
The weekly cadence also sets the rhythm for reading it. A single weekly print is one data point; the story is in the run of prints across a month against the same weeks in prior years. Chicken supply responds faster than beef or pork supply because the bird's production cycle is measured in weeks, so extended price strength tends to draw a supply response within a quarter, something the cattle cycle cannot do.