Lean hog index

The CME Lean Hog Index is the cash price that CME lean hog futures (HE) settle against when they expire. It is a two-day weighted average of the prices US packers paid for barrows and gilts on a carcass basis, as reported to USDA under mandatory price reporting. Wheats recalculates the same value every business day from USDA’s published data, so the cash hog market can be followed without a CME data licence.

How the lean hog index is calculated

The inputs come from USDA’s National Daily Direct Prior Day Hog Report for slaughtered swine (LM_HG201). Three purchase types count: producer-sold negotiated hogs, negotiated formula hogs, and hogs bought on a swine or pork market formula. For each report day USDA gives the head count and the average net price of each type; the index weights those prices by head over the two most recent report days. The result is in US dollars per hundredweight (100 lb) of carcass weight, which reads the same as futures quoted in cents per pound.

Negotiated hogs are the only purchases priced in an open daily trade, so their price and their share of all hogs show how much price discovery sits behind the index. When the negotiated share is thin, a few trades can move it.

This is Wheats’ replication of the published method, not the official CME Lean Hog Index, which CME calculates and licenses itself; rounding and USDA revisions can leave small differences. CME futures and settlement prices are not shown anywhere on Wheats.

Lean hog value since 2001

The monthly average was $73.38/cwt in Oct 2026, higher than in 49% of the 302 months since Aug 2001. Feed costs, the size of the US breeding herd, export demand from Mexico, China and Japan, and disease outbreaks such as African swine fever abroad drive the long swings.

Seasonal pattern

Hog prices follow the supply cycle of the herd: slaughter is usually lightest in early summer, when the index tends to peak, and heaviest in autumn and early winter, when it tends to bottom. The table shows each month’s average distance from its year’s mean over 2016–2025. On that record Jul has been the strongest month and Jan the weakest.

Sources

Cash hog prices: USDA AMS Livestock Mandatory Reporting, LM_HG201 (US public domain). Wheats provides information aggregation, not trading recommendations. See also CME lean hog futures, the pork cutout value, China hog prices and global pork demand, and the lean hog board in the Wheats terminal.