A Decade On, the Bay Area Is Hosting Another Super Bowl. How Have Prices Changed Since 2016?

Alongside Heated Rivalry rewatches and furious posts about the price of Harry Styles tickets, you may have noticed a nostalgic “me in 2016” micro-trend while scrolling social media in the last few weeks.

From your friends’ VSCO-filtered throwback photos featuring leggings and black mesh tops to “evil Kermit” memes and Vine compilations, many of our feeds were briefly overtaken by odes to a so-called simpler time a decade ago (This reporter remains baffled by the longing: This was the year Carrie Fisher died, after all).

2016 was also the year the Bay Area last hosted a Super Bowl, which saw the Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers and Coldplay as the halftime show with Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.

This Sunday, the NFL’s biggest game is returning to our region once again with Super Bowl LX at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, featuring the Seattle Seahawks, the New England Patriots and a halftime show by Bad Bunny.

With the universe seemingly insisting in this moment on us casting our minds back a decade earlier, there’s one aspect that’s hard to ignore: the affordability crisis that’s hit the Bay Area particularly hard, and just how much prices have risen since 2016.

But how simple is it to compare how much cheaper — or not — everyday items were back then, and how much prices have actually changed?

In the spirit of 2026 being the new 2016, let’s take a deep dive.

First off, what’s the best way to look at changing prices over the years?

To get an accurate impression of whether something has become more expensive, beyond the changing numbers, it’s important to account for inflation.

And according to Ricky Volpe, professor of Agribusiness at California Polytechnic State University, this makes the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — which measures price changes over time and serves as a key indicator of inflation — a good baseline for assessing increases.

“All Items” is an index category that encompasses a huge variety of U.S. consumer spending, from groceries to education to entertainment — and CPI “is grounded in the value of the U.S. Dollar,” said Volpe. “And that can serve as a benchmark for saying, ‘Okay, this is what’s been going on economy-wide.’”

From 2016 to 2025 (the most recent year for which data is available), the CPI has gone up 34.14%, said Volpe.

Meaning that relative to the value of the dollar, “anything that’s gone up faster than that has become less affordable,” he said.

What about the price of groceries?

“The last 10 years encapsulate quite a roller coaster ride in food prices in the US,” Volpe said.

In 2016, food prices actually decreased — something “we do not see that often in the U.S.,” he said. “Inflation is the name of the game.”

After 2016, food prices “started to tip up,” said Volpe — and then came COVID-19. The pandemic ushered in record food price inflation in 2021 and 2022, which remains top of mind for many U.S. consumers, he said.

“The current administration has a talking point that grocery prices are going down. That is not true,” Volpe said. “But what is true is that food prices are behaving largely normally right now.”

Regardless, because food prices have never outright dropped since then, “any increases we see now, even modest ones, are on top of the food price inflation that hit Americans so hard over the last few years,” said Volpe. “So consumer sentiment is very much down on food.”

Let’s look at the classic — and increasingly political — example of eggs: specifically, a dozen large grade A eggs. In 2016, the average cost nationwide was $1.68, according to data provided by Volpe.

The 2025 average was $4.41 — a 161.59% increase, meaning these types of eggs have become less affordable for Americans over this time period.

An increase more in line with the consumer price index would have seen 2025 eggs costing around $2.25 on average.

Elsewhere in the grocery aisles, white rice went from 72 cents per pound in 2016 to $1.05 in 2025 — a 46.43% increase.

And how about a snack you’re likely to see at a Super Bowl watch party, like potato chips? In 2016, the average price for 16 ounces of chips was $4.46, according to CPI data provided by Volpe. By 2025, those chips were $6.70 — a 50.12% increase.

By comparison, a price more aligned with the CPI would be around $5.98. But something that might surprise you: A gallon of fresh whole milk has actually become somewhat more affordable for Americans in this time period, relative to the U.S. dollar.

The 2016 average was $3.20, and the 2025 average was $4.07: a 26.97% increase, compared to the 34.14% rise in the Consumer Price Index.

What about local prices here in the Bay Area?

To look at more local examples here in the Bay Area, a few caveats are needed.

First, more localized data like this comes from different sources — meaning that because it may not match the exact timeline of the CPI increase, it won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison.

Another thing to know: From 2016 to 2025, the Bay Area — measured as the San Francisco, Oakland and Hayward region — saw a slightly lower increase in CPI than the national average, of 33.66% compared to that 34.14% increase nationwide.

But Volpe stressed that this “does not mean that costs or prices are comparable” between the Bay Area and the rest of the country. “It just means that the rate of change in prices or affordability has been comparable between the Bay Area and the rest of the country.”

With that, let’s look at …

The price of a Golden Gate Bridge toll

The current price of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge using FasTrak with a car or a motorcycle, as of the most recent price increase in 2025, is $9.75. Back on July 1, 2016, the FasTrak toll price was $6.50.

That’s a 50% increase, very much above the CPI increase — as a 2025 toll fare matching the CPI would be something more like $8.68.

The price of a BART fare

By now, you’re probably used to seeing annual announcements from BART about fare increases, with the most recent arriving Jan. 1.

According to BART, the agency’s “current funding model relies on passenger fares to pay for operations” (which BART also described last month as “an outdated model that is no longer feasible due to remote work.”)

Between 2016 and 2026, there’s been a 36% increase in the average BART fare (which, remember, encompasses more time than the CPI). In January 2016, the average fare was $3.67, with a minimum fare of $1.95 and a maximum of $15.70.

The current average fare in 2026 has officially been updated to $4.98, according to a BART spokesperson in an email to KQED. This makes the latest price range of a journey on BART between $2.55 and $17.25.

As an aside, remember that in 2016, we had physical BART tickets made of paper, which were phased out in late 2023.

The average rent in the Bay Area

This is a thornier example, since housing markets are more granular, and rental data has always been somewhat tricky to get ahold of. But you can’t talk about Bay Area prices without getting into rent, right?

For the purposes of our task, we’ll be referring to real-estate website Zillow’s metric called the “Zillow Observed Rent Index” — which a Zillow spokesperson told KQED is used by the company to assess “typical rent.”

Rather than reflecting a home’s number of beds or baths, this metric instead “looks at all available rentals, narrows into the middle third, then takes the average of just those units,” according to the spokesperson.

Zillow’s most recently available data is from a few months ago, for December 2025 — so let’s compare our rents with December 2015 this time. In 2025, in Santa Clara, where the Super Bowl will take place on Sunday, the typical rent was $3,578. Ten years ago, that number was $2,745: a rise of just over 30%.

But in San Francisco, a different picture emerges. According to Zillow’s metric, the typical rent in San Francisco in December 2025 was $3,666 — and in December 2015, it was $3,190.

This 10-year rise of just under 15% might strike you as lower than you’d expect.

Alex Lacter, a spokesperson for Zillow, told KQED that among the U.S.’s biggest 50 cities, the city’s growth in rent has actually “been by far the lowest over that period” — with the next lowest being Washington, D.C’s rent, at just under 26%. By comparison, he said, Fresno’s rents went up 90% in the same period.

But for context, it’s important to remember how rent “fell significantly in urban areas of San Francisco” during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Lacter, which put the city “behind many other markets when it comes to rent growth over this 10-year period.”

Ted Egan, chief economist with San Francisco’s Office of Economic Analysis, echoed this take: “Because of economic changes that happened to the city during COVID, housing is actually cheaper than it was 10 years ago,” he said.

Plus, in a city as expensive as San Francisco, “there’s only so high [rents] can climb where enough people can still afford them to keep units filled,” speculated Lacter.

The cost of season tickets for a 49ers game

The fact that Levi’s Stadium has changed the way it structures its seating since the last time it hosted a Super Bowl — almost tripling the number of pricing tiers on sale — makes this one slightly trickier to find an apples-to-apples ticket comparison, said Keith Pagello, founder of TicketData.

During the 2015-16 season, there were only 11 pricing tiers at Levi’s — but now the stadium is broken into 30 tiers.

However, even with that in mind, “the overall increase is still very clear,” said Pagello. For example, according to a 2026 ticketing season map, Section 101’s first 10 rows are priced at $315. The same section during the 2015-16 season was $125 — a 152% increase.

“Quite a jump!” Pagello said.