Oxtail is a by-product on the kill floor and a middle-meat price on the invoice. One tail per animal, mostly bone, gelatin and connective tissue, with a little meat between the joints. USDA prints it once a week, frozen, by the small box. The latest print, October 30, 2026, was $6.02 a pound for regular oxtail off cows. The same week the Choice peeled knuckle printed about $4.00 and the Choice plate short rib about $7.10. A cut that comes off the drop now costs more than the round and not much less than the plate.
What USDA prints
Oxtail is not in the daily boxed beef report. It sits in the weekly variety meat report, FOB and frozen, in dollars per hundredweight, with two lines:
| Line | From | Printed since |
|---|---|---|
| Oxtails regular, small box | Cows | September 2022, most weeks |
| Oxtails selected, small box | Steers and heifers, sometimes cows | February 2018, some weeks |
The regular line is the one to watch. It has printed 177 times since it began, 34 times so far in 2026, and a typical print is under one truckload. The selected line prints a few times a year and has not run above the regular line on more than one week of the fourteen when both printed.
That thinness matters. A week's print can be a handful of trades, so one buyer filling a program can move it, and a week with no print is a week with no trade reported, not a week the market stood still.
Four years, one direction
| Year | Median print, regular |
|---|---|
| 2022 (Sep to Dec) | $3.89/lb |
| 2023 | $4.31/lb |
| 2024 | $5.61/lb |
| 2025 | $5.85/lb |
| 2026 (to Oct 30) | $5.87/lb |
From the first print in September 2022 to the latest the series is up 55 percent. The high was $6.71 a pound on September 19, 2025, and the latest print sits about 10 percent under it. There is no season in the print: the median by month runs between $5.30 in December and $5.78 in April, which is inside the week-to-week noise.
The older selected line tells the same story over a longer stretch, with one spike. It printed around $3.20 in 2018, jumped to $7.50 in September 2021 on a handful of prints, fell back to about $3.40 in 2022, and prints near $5.95 now.
Against the box
The last 12 months, median weekly averages, Choice unless stated:
| Cut | $/lb | Oxtail printed higher |
|---|---|---|
| Ribeye, lip-on, bone-in | $10.69 | never |
| Strip loin 0x1 | $9.84 | never |
| Plate short rib | $6.36 | 7% of weeks |
| Oxtail, cows, regular | $5.86 | |
| Chuck short rib | $5.47 | 90% of weeks |
| Brisket, deckle-off, boneless | $4.73 | every week |
| Peeled knuckle | $4.72 | every week |
| Choice cutout, per pound | $3.79 | every week |
So the title is a little generous to the middle meats. Oxtail is not a strip loin. It is an end-meat cut by anatomy that prices above every end meat and beside the plate short rib, the dearest thing on the plate primal.
Against the cutout the ratio has come in a little. In 2023 oxtail ran 1.4 times the cutout per pound, in 2024 1.8 times, in 2025 1.7, and this year 1.5. The box caught up some of the gap. Oxtail did not fall.
Why a by-product prices like this
The supply is one tail per animal, and nothing a packer does changes that. Fewer cattle through the plant means fewer tails, full stop, and the cow kill is where the regular line comes from.
The demand is concentrated and does not substitute. Oxtail goes to Caribbean, Asian and halal kitchens, where it is the dish, not an ingredient. Those buyers do not switch to a knuckle when oxtail gets dear, so the price carries.
It is a frozen, boxed, traded item, which widens the map. In Canada much of the oxtail on the market comes in frozen from Europe, Australia and New Zealand, while domestic product trades both fresh and frozen. The USDA print is a frozen FOB print, and that is the number the imports are quoted against.