Data Methodology

How menu data, images, nutrition, and prices on this site are sourced, verified, and kept current.

Menu items, descriptions, nutrition, and images

Item names, category placement, descriptions, calories, ingredient statements, allergen notes, and product photography are imported directly from McDonald's own public website — the same unauthenticated pages and JSON endpoints anyone can view in a browser, and which McDonald's makes available to search engines. We do not scrape authenticated systems, bypass bot protection, or invent any of this information. Each imported item records its official source URL and the date it was last checked.

Why local prices are different from the rest of the data

McDonald's does not publish per-restaurant pricing on any page or API that does not require an account or app session. We do not log in to, scrape, or reverse-engineer the mobile ordering platform to obtain that data, because doing so would violate the access controls McDonald's has put in place. That means an exact price at one specific restaurant cannot be fully automated the way the national menu can — every restaurant-specific price is either admin-verified or clearly labeled as a typical U.S. price (see below).

How local prices are verified

Prices labeled as verified for a specific restaurant are entered by a site administrator after a specific, citable observation — for example, a menu board photo, a printed receipt, or a phone/in-person confirmation with a specific restaurant on a specific date. Every stored price keeps that citation internally, and a verified price is never overwritten by an automated refresh.

Typical U.S. prices (weekly automated)

Where a restaurant has no admin-verified price yet, the site shows a typical U.S. price instead of leaving it blank — clearly badged as such, and never presented as if it were verified at that specific restaurant. These figures are refreshed automatically once a week and are used only as a fallback until a real local observation is entered. Because they are not a same-day, in-person check at your specific restaurant, actual prices there may be higher or lower — you can help by reporting what you actually see on the menu board.

What "last checked" means

The "last checked" date on an item or restaurant is the date that specific piece of data — a menu item's description/nutrition, or a restaurant's price/availability — was last confirmed against its source. It is not a general "site last updated" timestamp.

How averages, minimums, and maximums are calculated

City, state, and item-level price statistics are calculated only from restaurants that have at least one admin-verified price for that item. We always disclose the sample size (number of restaurants) behind an average. We do not publish an average, "cheapest," or "most expensive" statistic when the sample size is too small to be meaningful — currently that means most averages will show as unavailable until enough verified observations exist.

How restaurant locations are sourced

Restaurant addresses, phone numbers, coordinates, and posted hours come from McDonald's public store-locator service — the same public, unauthenticated API that powers the "find a McDonald's" search on mcdonalds.com. Locations are periodically re-checked; if a location becomes unreachable in a refresh, we keep the last known data and mark it as not recently re-verified rather than deleting it or guessing at a replacement.

How unavailable items are handled

If an item cannot be found on the current national menu during a refresh, it is marked inactive rather than deleted, so its historical data and any price history remain intact and visible where relevant.

How price history works

Every verified price observation is appended to a permanent price-history table — existing rows are never overwritten or deleted. Item price-history charts only ever show the real observations we have actually collected; if only a few weeks of history exist for an item, the chart shows only those few weeks rather than a fabricated longer trend.

Reporting an error

Every item and restaurant page has a "Report incorrect price" link. Submissions are reviewed by an administrator before anything on the site changes — they are never published automatically.