Every holiday budget gets built around the wrong number.
You brace for the turkey and price out the sides. You watch the grocery total climb and decide that is where the squeeze lives.
For most of the past four years that instinct was sound, because food at home carried the inflation story and the Thanksgiving table was the line item that moved.
That has changed. Federal price data for September puts the table close to flat and puts the cost of reaching it up more than a fifth.
Vivian Tu, the social media personal finance personality and best-selling author, pointed her readers at the right line on Sunday, and the government numbers released three weeks earlier say she is right by a wider margin than her own newsletter claims.
Tu told readers to book immediately
“If you haven’t booked your flight home for the holidays, I suggest you get on that ASAP,” Tu wrote in the Nov. 1 edition of her enRICHed newsletter, published on Substack under her Your Rich BFF brand.
She put domestic economy round-trip Thanksgiving fares up nearly 24% year over year and international fares up roughly 33%, citing reporting by Forbes.
More Travel:
- Air France exits entire market again
- American Airlines leaves empty seats while charging flyers more
- EasyJet will pay for your child’s first passport
Those figures come from Fareportal, the travel technology company behind CheapOair and OneTravel, according to the Forbes piece, which was published Oct. 12 and updated Oct. 23.
Tu runs the AI money app Ask Dolly and promotes it inside the same newsletter’s reader question section, so the advice arrives alongside a product she owns.
Government data backs the fare call
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put its airline fares index up 22.4% over the 12 months through September, in the Consumer Price Index release issued Oct. 14.
That lands within two points of the Fareportal number Tu cited, which is unusually close agreement between a company’s booking data and a federal index.
Fares also rose 1.2% in September alone on a seasonally adjusted basis, after gains of 2.2% in July and 2.7% in August, per the same release.
Related: Vivian Tu sounds the alarm on a hidden tax hitting your wallet
The engine is fuel. Gasoline of all types ran up 34.2% over 12 months and the full energy index gained 20.4%, with gasoline alone accounting for over half of September’s entire monthly price increase, the bureau said.
Airlines have been unusually willing to protect those prices, and American Airlines (AAL) has told investors it will accept emptier planes rather than discount seats.
The dinner is the cheap part
PwC expects Thanksgiving to cost the average American family about $90 this year against $88 last year, Ali Furman, the firm’s consumer markets industry leader, told Good Morning America in an exclusive shared with ABC News on Oct. 15.
That is a $2 increase, or 2.3%.
Set the two side by side and the holiday math inverts. Airfares are climbing nearly 10 times faster than the Thanksgiving meal.
The table is not uniformly cheap. Turkey will cost Americans nearly 8% more than last year and a smaller cranberry harvest pushes cranberry prices up nearly 15%, Furman told the program.
Federal data corroborates the turkey figure almost exactly. The index for other uncooked poultry including turkey rose 8.4% over 12 months, per the September CPI.
The offsets are real too. Butter is down 10% and cream is down 6%, Furman said, and the CPI has butter down 10.3% over the same 12 months.
Food at home across the whole basket rose just 1.8% over the year, which is less than half the 3.7% headline inflation rate.
At a glance
12-month price changes through September 2026
- Airline fares: up 22.4%
- Gasoline, all types: up 34.2%
- Energy: up 20.4%
- Other uncooked poultry including turkey: up 8.4%
- Food at home: up 1.8%
- Butter: down 10.3%
- All items: up 3.7%
- Average hourly earnings: up 3.0%, to $37.81
- Personal saving rate, September: 3.8%
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index and Employment Situation releases, Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income release
Your pay did not keep up
Average hourly earnings for private nonfarm workers reached $37.81 in September, up 3.0% over 12 months, the Labor Department reported Oct. 2.
Hold that against 3.7% headline inflation and the average paycheck lost roughly 0.7 percentage points of purchasing power over the year. That subtraction is ours, not the bureau’s.
Run the holiday basket through the same wage figure and the ranking is stark. Airfares rose about seven and a half times faster than pay.
Gasoline rose 11.4 times faster than pay.
The Thanksgiving meal is the only item on the list that rose slower than your wages, by about seven tenths of a point.
The cushion is thinner at the same time. The personal saving rate fell to 3.8% in September from 4.5% in July, its lowest reading of 2026, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis release of Oct. 29.
Real disposable personal income fell 0.3% in September, the same release shows, even though income in current dollars rose 0.2%.
That pressure is already showing up in how people pay for the season, with some shoppers trimming groceries to fund gifts.
Shipping gifts gets more expensive too
Pricing for express parcel deliveries is forecast to jump 13.8% in the fourth quarter against the same quarter of 2025, according to the TD Cowen/AFS Freight Index as reported by Reuters on Oct. 26.
Ground delivery pricing is forecast up 5.8% over the same period.
United Parcel Service (UPS) is charging a 29.5% fuel surcharge and FedEx (FDX) is charging 29%, Reuters reported, at an average diesel price of $6.28 a gallon.
“Fuel is front and center in everybody’s consideration and, again, no real good news there,” Mingshu Bates, chief analytics officer at AFS Logistics, told the news agency.
The index reports percentage changes rather than dollar amounts, because parcel costs vary by weight, size and destination.
What it means for you
Move your holiday cutting to transport and leave the menu alone. A 2.3% meal increase is not where your money is going.
Book the flight this week rather than next. Fares gained ground in each of the last three months the bureau has measured, so waiting has carried a cost all autumn.
Shift the trip off the peak days if the dates are yours to choose. Departure and return timing moves a holiday fare far more than 22.4% ever will.
Buy shelf-stable ingredients now while they are on promotion, which is the one piece of Tu’s food advice the price data supports outright.
Ship gifts on ground service, and buy in person where you can. The forecast gap between express and ground this quarter is eight points.
Do not solve a transport problem with a credit card, because holiday card balances outlive the trip that created them.
The rest of the season still has a year-end money checklist attached to it, and open enrollment closes before the first flight boards.
The October price data arrives Nov. 18 and the October jobs report lands Nov. 6, which together will show whether fares kept climbing into the booking window.
Watch the energy line in both. Every holiday number that is actually hurting traces back to fuel, and the Thanksgiving table is mostly a bystander this year.
Related: Vivian Tu’s IPO warning lands as SpaceX buyers split by $1,851
