The pork carcass cutout is USDA's daily estimate of what a hog carcass is worth on the wholesale market. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes it in two reports each business day: a morning edition (LM_PK601) summarizing trade reported overnight and into the morning, and an afternoon edition (LM_PK602) that closes out the session. The afternoon edition is the version most participants quote when they refer to "the cutout."
Like the beef cutout, the pork value is synthetic. It takes negotiated sales of pork sub-primals (loins, butts, hams, picnics, bellies, ribs, and trim) and weights them by their yield share of a standardized 215-pound hog carcass. A typical print in 2024 to 2026 has run in the $90 to $110 per cwt range, well below beef cutout levels because pork is structurally a lower-priced protein and the carcass yield mix is different. Sharp upside swings into the $130s and beyond appear when bellies firm hard, since bellies carry outsized weight in the calculation.
How pork differs from beef
Three things make the pork cutout feel different from the beef cutout in practice. First, pork bellies are a single item with outsized weight in the calculation and a famously erratic price (more on this in the bellies article). A belly move of $10/cwt in a session is not unusual, and a single primal move of that magnitude can swing the cutout meaningfully on its own. Second, pork is more retail-led than beef. Pork loin and pork butt features at major grocery chains pull demand on a tighter cycle than beef features do, so retail program announcements show up faster in the cutout. Third, pork supply is more elastic in the short run than beef supply because hog production cycles are shorter, which means demand-side surprises do not get absorbed by inventory the way beef supply absorbs them.
What the report carries
LM_PK602 carries the cutout headline (carcass cwt and primal value), the same numbers for the prior session and the five-day rolling average, and a primal breakdown for each of the major pork primals. Beneath that, individual sub-primal items appear with their own prices and load counts: loins boneless (IMPS 413), bone-in loins (410), various trim specs, the belly weight bands (bellies trade by weight class because thicker bellies render bacon differently), spareribs in the St. Louis and full-spare formats, and the picnic and butt specs.
The load count column on PK602 is reported the same way as the beef report, in 40,000-pound truckload equivalents. A heavy session might print 300 to 400 carcass-equivalent loads; a quiet session, 150 to 200.
Why a buyer watches it
A pork buyer at a foodservice distributor or large retail chain uses the carcass cutout as the daily anchor for negotiation just as a beef buyer uses the boxed beef cutout. The reading is more nuanced because of the bellies factor: a cutout move that came from bellies has different implications for someone who only buys loins than the same move that came from loins themselves. For that reason, working pork buyers usually skip past the cutout headline on a fast read and go directly to the primal section to see where the money moved.
The cutout also matters as the bridge between live hog prices and finished pork prices. Packer margin on pork is the gap between the carcass cutout and the live hog cost (with adjustments for byproduct and yield), and that margin is one of the better leading indicators for whether kill levels will hold or drop in the next several weeks. A packer running margin pressure for an extended stretch typically responds by trimming Saturday kills first and weekday kills second.