Thanksgiving is a time to gather with loved ones, to show gratitude for life’s abundance — and, of course, to eat.

And when it comes to Thanksgiving food, it seems Americans are getting relief on their grocery bills this year following a few years of escalating costs.

A “classic” Thanksgiving feast for a party of 10 will cost $58.08 in 2024, on average — down 5% from 2023 and down 9% from 2022, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group for farmers and ranchers.

Its analysis includes turkey, cubed stuffing, sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, frozen peas, fresh cranberries, celery, carrots, pumpkin pie mix and crusts, whipping cream and whole milk.

Prices for this food basket were at a record high in 2022, at $64.05, the Farm Bureau said.

Households that add ham, russet potatoes and frozen green beans into the mix would pay $77.34 in 2024, on average — an 8% decrease from 2023, the Farm Bureau said.

The annual decline in prices will be welcome news to many households: Nearly half, 44%, of people hosting Thanksgiving this year are concerned about the cost of the event, according to a recent Deloitte survey.

The decrease is largely due to various supply-and-demand dynamics driving down prices for key staples — turkey, most importantly — and an overarching decline in U.S. food inflation, according to economists.

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“Food inflation has been pretty tame,” said Robin Wenzel, head of the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. “You’re seeing some good relief there.”

That said, a classic Thanksgiving meal is still 19% pricier than it was in 2019, according to the Farm Bureau.

“Declines don’t really erase the dramatic increases we had,” said Bernt Nelson, a Farm Bureau economist.

The national average cost for a 16-pound turkey is down 6% from 2023, according to the Farm Bureau. Overall turkey prices have decreased about 4% in the past year, according to the consumer price index.

Turkey has been a “curious item this year,” Nelson said.

On one hand, turkey supply is down “significantly,” he said. Farmers raised about 205 million turkeys in 2024, down 6% from 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the lowest figure since 1985, Nelson said.

Largely, that’s because of the impact of bird flu, a lethal and contagious disease among birds that has contributed to the deaths of about 14 million turkeys since 2022, he said.

Lower supply would tend to raise prices, all else equal. But consumer demand has decreased as well. To that point, turkey consumption per capita has fallen by about one pound this year, he said.

The aggregate impact has been lower turkey prices.

For example, in 2022, food prices grew faster than any year since 1979, partly due to a bird-flu outbreak that affected egg and poultry prices, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “compounded other economy-wide inflationary pressures such as high energy costs,” according to the USDA.

Higher costs for energy such as gasoline and diesel fuel translate into higher prices across the food supply chain, such as to distribute groceries to store shelves, experts said.

“Food price growth slowed in 2023 as wholesale food prices and these other inflationary factors eased from 2022,” the USDA said, and it has declined further in 2024.

A menu of completely store-brand items to feed 10 friends and family members would yield a total savings of $17, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.

Consumers often pay a premium for name-brand items, but that’s not true in all cases this year.

For example, name-brand cranberries are cheaper than the store brand, on average, Wenzel said.

“When shopping this year, it really comes back to doing a little bit of research,” Wenzel said.     

Since President Joe Biden took office, the Education Department has canceled the federal student loans of nearly 5 million people, totaling $175 billion in relief, according to the White House.

It has done so mostly by improving existing student loan relief programs that had long been plagued by problems, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness initiative and income-driven repayment plans.

Those borrowers should be in the clear, experts say.

“Any regulatory changes must be prospective only,” meaning that eliminations to loan forgiveness programs would only impact new borrowers, explained Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit that helps borrowers navigate the repayment of their debt.

“They aren’t allowed to change regulations retroactively,” she added.

For that reason, even borrowers who have been pursuing forgiveness under an income-driven repayment plan or a program like PSLF, but have not yet received that relief, may be safe.

The terms of a loan, which are spelled out in the Master Promissory Note federal student loan borrowers sign when they take out the debt, can’t be change in the middle of repayment, experts said.

In June, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree in Wichita, Kansas, described student loan forgiveness as having an “irreversible impact,” in his decision to block one of the Biden administration’s relief measures.

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The retraction of student loan forgiveness is incredibly rare, Kantrowitz writes in a recent article in The College Investor.

For example, in February, some borrowers saw their debts reinstated under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Yet that only occurred because the debt cancellation was granted through an error, and the borrowers were not yet eligible for the relief.

“Don’t worry,” Kantrowitz said. “The president does not have the legal authority to reinstate forgiven loans.”

Still, borrowers should keep a record of the notices they’ve received about their forgiven debt, and any loan documents showing a $0 balance, Kantrowitz said.

In a new report, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cites, among the errors reported by student loan borrowers, “balance reinstatements,” in which a loan servicer tacks a loan balance back on to one’s account.

Prospective car buyers considering an electric vehicle may need to act fast to get a Biden-era EV tax credit worth up to $7,500, due to the likelihood that President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill will axe those savings in tax negotiations next year, according to auto and legal experts.

“There’s no question there’s real risk in the EV credit going away” in 2025, said Jamie Wickett, a partner at law firm Hogan Lovells who specializes in federal tax policy, energy and the environment.

“If you’re a consumer in the market for an EV, I would without a doubt push that into 2024, if at all possible — whether an outright purchase or a lease — just to reduce the risk of the credit going away,” Wickett said.

The Inflation Reduction Act offered federal EV tax breaks through 2032 for consumers who buy or lease new or used EVs, including all-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

The credit is worth up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used ones.

The IRA, which President Joe Biden signed in 2022, also made it easier for consumers to access the savings by allowing dealers to pay the funds upfront at purchase instead of waiting until tax season.

The Trump transition team reportedly aims to eliminate the EV credits to raise money for a broad package of tax cuts Republicans are expected to pursue next year.

Trump’s campaign agenda vowed to “cancel the electric vehicle mandate.”

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla and an influential Trump supporter, has also called for an end to the credits and said killing the subsidies would hurt the EV maker’s U.S. competitors.

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Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump-Vance transition, said the president-elect would follow through with his pledge.

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Leavitt said in an email. “He will deliver.”

There’s considerable uncertainty over the contents of a future Republican tax package and the fate of the EV credit, experts said.

Extending a slew of expiring income tax cuts and fulfilling various Trump campaign promises like slashing taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay, for example, could cost about $7.8 trillion over 10 years, the Tax Foundation estimates.

Repealing all the IRA’s green energy tax credits, including the EV credit, would offset that cost by about $921 billion, it said.

Most consumers have opted to get the credit as a discount at the point of sale, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The car dealer essentially issues an advance tax credit to consumers, and the Treasury then refunds that advance payment.

Consumers who sign a lease agreement by year’s end would be able to lock in their savings contractually over a multiyear lease term, even though the term would overlap with Trump’s presidency, Malmgren said.

But look over the agreement terms. One caveat might be if a dealer were to write a clause into the lease contract stipulating that if the tax credit were denied then the consumer’s monthly lease payments would increase, Wickett said.

He expects Republicans to pass a tax package by the end of 2025. In the most likely scenario, such a law would probably phase out the federal EV credit in 2026 or 2027, instead of turning off the spigot retroactively for all 2025 purchases, Wickett said.

“No one knows for sure,” he said. “But I think it’s fairly clear the Republicans are going to find a way to pass a major tax bill.”