When a cut prints blank on a USDA report, the market did not stop. The report did. Every line on the daily beef and pork reports passes a confidentiality test before it prints, and a line that fails is left off that day. The test is called 3/70/20, it is written down, and it explains most of the blanks a buyer runs into.
What the rule says
USDA's mandatory price reporting law makes packers report their trades. It also requires USDA to publish in a way that never shows who traded. The guideline that squares those two is from August 2001, and it runs three tests over the most recent 60 days:
| Test | The rule |
|---|---|
| 3 | At least three packers must have provided data at least half the time |
| 70 | No one packer may have provided more than 70 percent of the data |
| 20 | No one packer may have been the only one reporting more than 20 percent of the time |
The 60 days are counted in reporting days and weekday holidays, so a holiday week does not shorten the window. USDA checks each report and each line against the three tests, and it never publishes how many packers were behind a line or who they were. That last part is in the same notice, so the answer to "which packer dropped out" is never coming.
The rule replaced an older one, called 3/60, that needed three packers and no 60 percent share on every single day. USDA wrote that under the old rule nearly a third of the daily cattle and hog reports were withheld and many others went out with line items missing. The 60-day window was the fix: it lets a thin line print on a day when only one or two packers traded, as long as the two months behind it were broad enough.
Which lines print and which go dark
The rule is why a busy cut prints every day and a thin one prints when it can. This year, through November 11, the daily beef and pork reports have had 221 report days.
| Report, 2026 | Lines that printed at least once | Printed 9 days in 10 or more | Printed less than half the days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beef cuts | 65 | 35 | 17 |
| Pork cuts | 200 | 41 | 120 |
The pork list is long because every cut has a fresh, frozen, boxed, poly and vac version, and most of those variants print only when a load of exactly that pack traded. The core of the report never misses: strap-on and strap-off loins, derind 13-17 bellies, trimmed loins, butts, the 23-27 trimmed selected ham, 2-up backribs and picnic cushion meat each printed on 220 of the 221 days.
Grade is the other place the rule shows. The same cut often prints on the Choice side and goes blank on the Select side, because the Select trade is thinner.
| Cut, 2026 | Choice days | Select days |
|---|---|---|
| Ribeye, lip-on, bone-in | 218 | 86 |
| Chuck tender | 219 | 86 |
| Knuckle, peeled | 219 | 136 |
| Strip loin 0x1 | 219 | 208 |
So a Select ribeye quote has a USDA print to check against on about two days in five. On the other three it has the last print and the Choice line.
Even busy cuts have gaps. Among beef lines with a hundred or more prints this year, the top inside cap off went 15 days without a print and the strip loin 1x1 went 14. Nothing happened to those cuts in those weeks. A 60-day window closed on them and reopened.
What a blank does not mean
A blank is not a zero and it is not a signal. It means the packers who traded that cut that day, over the last 60 days, did not add up to three, or one of them was too big a share of it. On a cut that trades at two plants, that can be true for weeks at a time with trucks moving every day.
It also tells you nothing from the packer's side. No packer has ever told us a line did not report. The blank is on the reader's screen and nowhere else.
What to price off when yours is blank
The trade's answer is the last print or the packer list, and that is the right one. The last print is still USDA's number, with its date on it, and the gap between that date and today is the thing to carry in your head: a two-day-old print on a busy cut is a price, a three-week-old print on a thin one is a reference. The packer list is the live number, and it is the one the print was built from when it did print.
The cut pages here show the last print with its date for exactly that reason, and the chart has no point on a blank day rather than a guessed one. A thin line is still a line. It just prints on its own schedule, and the schedule is the rule above.