Americans overestimate their barbecue skills by 32%, survey finds

The price of an Independence Day cookout kept climbing even as confidence on the grill ran ahead of reality. The American Farm Bureau Federation put the average 2026 cookout for 10 people at $73.82, or $7.38 per person, up $2.90, or 4%, from 2025 and the highest level since the survey began in 2013.

That rising cost landed beside a sharper finding about American self-image at the barbecue. Prairie Fresh’s State of Barbecue Report: Understanding America’s Grill Gap, based on responses from more than 1,500 U.S. consumers, found that Americans’ confidence in their barbecue skills exceeded their actual competence by 32%. The gap suggests that the backyard grill remains one of the few ordinary places where people still perform expertise in public, whether they earned it or not.

The report also found that more than 1 in 4 Americans avoid cooking pork altogether, a meaningful detail for a category that sits at the center of many regional barbecue traditions. Men said they were 8% more confident at barbecue than women, even though actual knowledge between the two groups was nearly identical. In other words, the confidence premium was bigger than the skill premium.

That mismatch fits a long American habit of treating barbecue as more than a meal. The National Archives Foundation has described food, especially barbecue, as a mediator of family and international gatherings, a role that gives a backyard cookout more social weight than a simple dinner on paper. The Library of Congress has traced barbecue’s evolution from very early live-fire cooking, nearly 2 million years ago, to charcoal briquettes, gas grills and modern barbecue restaurants, underscoring how a basic method of cooking became a national ritual.

The ritual even gets its own calendar date. National Barbecue Day falls on May 16 each year, a nod to how deeply grilling has been folded into American identity, from holiday cookouts to neighborhood feasts and regional bragging rights. In that setting, the numbers from Prairie Fresh and the Farm Bureau tell the same story: Americans are paying more to cook outdoors, and many still believe they can do it better than they can.