Fact Check: Viral Facebook Post Claims McDonald's McChicken Sandwiches Cost $4.89 in June 2024. Here's the Truth

Claim:

The cost of a McDonald's McChicken sandwich in June 2024 was $4.89.

Rating:

On June 10, 2024, the conservative organization Media Research Center (MRCTV) posted (archived) an image on Facebook. The image displayed a McDonald's McChicken sandwich with an "end-of-2019 price" of $1.29 and a "mid-2024 price" of $4.89, along with a calculated increase of 279.1 percent. The MRC post caption referenced U.S. President Joe Biden, reading, "Thanks, Joe." A repost (archived) of the image on June 12 displayed the caption, "Rest in Peace to the days when fast food was affordable." Other users also reposted the image on X.

The pricing information in MRC's image referenced worldwide inflation in recent years, or more specifically the rising costs in the U.S. fast-food industry. Regarding this subject, The Associated Press published on May 29, "McDonald's said the average price of all menu items has risen 40 percent over the last five years, to account for a 40 percent average increase in the cost of labor, paper and food. That is higher than overall consumer prices, which have increased 21 percent since December 2019, according to government figures."

The purported "mid-2024 price" of $4.89 was the primary claim in the image, according to users' interpretations of the post reflected in their comments, the fact MRC posted the image on Facebook in June 2024, and the yellow, highlighted background behind the dollar figure. One commenter wrote of the image, "I don't eat McDonald's. However, it does tend to show how well Biden's Build Back Better is working."

On June 13, Snopes conducted research to find the truth at the center of the piece of media posted by MRC. While a wealth of data about 2019 pricing was not readily available, we were able to conclude the MRC post's primary claim about the "mid-2024 price" of a McChicken was false. Our data is presented below, including rough estimates for the national-average cost and the average cost of a McDonald's McChicken sandwich in California.

We emailed MRC on June 13 asking if it planned to correct or retract the false Facebook posts. On the following day, a spokesperson for MRC responded to our inquiry. That response appears later in this story.

Error in MRC's Citation of FastFoodMenuPrices.com

Without any visible context in the MRC post's image, the image appeared to reference U.S. national average prices for the McDonald's McChicken sandwich. The slightly visible citation displayed at the bottom of the image read, "Source: fastfoodmenuprices.com (As of End of May 2024)."

A visit to fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/ (archived) – the source displayed at the bottom of the image – showed information explaining that the FastFoodMenuPrices.com author sourced the $4.89 price reposted by MRC from a single McDonald's restaurant at 904 Manhattan Ave. in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Also, the FastFoodMenuPrices.com author listed the lone restaurant's price as "for 2023," not for the "end of May 2024" as MRC claimed. FastFoodMenuPrices.com added on its website, "Keep in mind that prices vary a lot depending on where you are, and you might not pay what we paid." This statement was absent from MRC's image.

Setting all of the MRC post's discrepancies aside, a quick and simple check of the publicly available McDonald's mobile app for the June 2024 price at the same Brooklyn McDonald's location displayed $3.49 for a McChicken – a price far short of the $4.89 MRC published to its followers.

The June 2024 cost of the specific Brooklyn McDonald's restaurant cited in the data was $3.49, not $4.89.

Rough Average for US McChicken Price

We continued to use the McDonald's mobile app in order to land on a rough national average cost for the McDonald's McChicken sandwich. For our research, we manually cycled through hundreds of the company's restaurants in the app to compile a sampling of pricing data.

In our first study, we randomly selected three McDonald's restaurants from each of the 50 U.S. states. The result of the 150-restaurant study was a rough national average of $2.79 for a McChicken – once again, a price nowhere near $4.89.

More Data for California

According to the ScrapeHero website, as of March 12, 2024, there were 13,529 McDonalds restaurants in the United States. "The state and territory with the most number of McDonalds locations in the U.S. is California, with 1,221 restaurants, which is about 9 percent of all McDonald's restaurants in the U.S.," Scrapehero reported. (Alternatively, McDonalds.com published in March 2023, "California is home to nearly 1,300 McDonald's restaurants.")

In light of this data – as well as the California $20 minimum wage hike affecting McDonald's and other fast-food companies – we collected pricing information for 50 additional, randomly selected McDonald's restaurants in California. According to the data collected only from that sampling of 50 California locations, the rough average state cost of a McChicken was $3.35. This cost was higher than our study's rough national average of $2.79 but still not close to $4.89.

We also calculated the average of all 200 McDonald's locations for which we compiled data. Those 200 locations included three locations for each of 49 U.S. states (excluding California) and 53 locations for California restaurants. This calculation perhaps added too many locations for California compared to the state's smaller-percentage slice into the national makeup of the company. Even so, that rough average of 200 total McDonald's locations calculated $2.93 for a McChicken. All of our data is available for viewing in a two-tab spreadsheet via Google Sheets.

MRC Response to Snopes

On June 14, MRC Communications Director Iris Miller responded to our email inquiry from the previous day. Miller wrote, "After further review, our team realized the cited website says updated 2024 but the McChicken specifically says 2023. We've added a correction to our post and will be making new graphics for future posts. Unfortunately, Facebook no longer lets you swap out the picture so we cannot correct that without deleting. We used this site since they have past and present (or recent) numbers. As you know, prices can vary widely depending on location."

However, again, as evidenced by the research presented in this fact-check article, MRC's image about McChicken prices involved a lot more than a simple mix-up involving the year.

For further reading, we previously looked into other McDonald's rumors claiming the company planned to leave California entirely and that McNuggets are made with silicone oil.

Sources:

"About." MRCTV, https://www.mrctv.org/about.

Bauder, David. "Conservative Groups Attempting to Kill Prospective ABC Show." The Associated Press, 9 Apr. 2015, https://apnews.com/television-76f7856b0793468f9c013bb63a45f245.

Durbin, Dee-Ann. "McDonald's Says $18 Big Mac Meal Was an 'exception' and News Reports Overstated Its Price Increases." The Associated Press, 29 May 2024, https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-inflation-prices-big-mac-c9c4abef25369f6b87b2781f5658bc0e.

"McDonald's Menu Prices." FastFoodMenuPrices.com, https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/.

"Number of McDonald's Locations in the USA in 2024." ScrapeHero, 12 Mar. 2024, https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/McDonalds-USA/.

The Conversation. "Inflation Is Spiking Around the World — Not Just in US." Snopes.com, 1 Aug. 2022, https://www.snopes.com//news/2022/08/01/inflation-us-world/.

"The McDonald's System's Billion Dollar Impact: California." McDonalds.com, https://www.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-stories/article/mcdonalds-billion-dollar-impact-california.html.