The turkey most people picture is a whole bird in November. The turkey most buyers actually price is a boneless breast in every other month. USDA reports boneless skinless tom breast every week, and since September 2022 that series has printed 205 times. This is what those prints say, and what they refuse to say.
Toms, hens, and why the tom is the market
USDA classes turkeys by sex and weight: hens at 8 to 16 pounds, toms at 16 to 24. The parts report carries breast lines for both, but the market is on one side of that split. Tom boneless skinless breast printed 205 of the roughly 208 weeks in the window. Hen boneless skinless breast printed nine times in four years, all of them between June and September 2025. A bigger bird yields a bigger breast, and a bigger breast is what a further processor wants; whatever the reason, the tom breast is the only turkey breast price a buyer can follow week to week in public data. Every number below is the tom.
The level, and the two shocks
The median tom breast price across the window is 317 cents a pound. The range is enormous: a low of 193 cents in 2024, a high of 729 on December 26, 2025. The 2024 calendar year never printed above 273. The 2025 calendar year printed a median of 436.
That is not a season. Sixty-one of the 205 weeks printed at 500 cents or higher, and every one of them falls in two windows: September 2022 through February 2023, and August 2025 through May 2026. Both are periods when highly pathogenic avian influenza was taking turkey flocks out of production. Between the two windows, from March 2023 to May 2025, the breast never printed above 400; it climbed through June and July 2025 into the second window.
Four years is too few to claim a calendar pattern for this cut, and an honest read of the month-by-month medians shows why: September and October look expensive only because 2022 and 2025 land there. A buyer planning on a "fall breast rally" is planning on a bird flu year. The seasonality that does exist in turkey is the whole-bird run-up covered in the Thanksgiving article; the breast market is a supply market.
Fresh over frozen
Fresh and frozen tom breast overlap in 97 weeks of the record. Fresh printed above frozen in 86 percent of them, by a median of 36 cents a pound. The frozen line also trades on much thinner volume: a median of 40 thousand pounds a week against 440 thousand for fresh. When the fresh market spikes the frozen discount widens, because frozen inventory was bought at the old price; that is the same mechanism the Cold Storage report describes for every protein.
Breast against thigh
Boneless skinless turkey thigh meat is reported most weeks too, and the median breast-to-thigh ratio is 1.9: the breast costs nearly twice the dark meat. The chicken market has moved the other way in recent years, with boneless thighs closing on breast, and the turkey ratio is one of the clearer illustrations that turkey breast is a white-meat product first and a turkey product second.
Where it sits now
The latest print in this record, August 21, 2026, is 307 cents a pound, with the last eight weeks between 302 and 358. That is just under the long-run median of 317 and a long way down from the 729 peak eight months earlier. The breast price page carries the current week.