How We Price the Sonic Menu

What the data is

The site is built on a store level menu dataset: one recorded price for every item at every location that lists it. That is 1,551,532 separate price observations across 165 products and 513 priced sizes, since most items are sold in more than one size and each size is priced on its own.

Nothing on this site is estimated, rounded to look tidy, or carried over from another website. Where the data does not contain a figure, the page says so instead of offering one.

Why the median, not the average

A franchised menu does not have one price. It has a distribution, and the shape of that distribution is the thing most price guides throw away.

Take the All-American Bacon Triple SONIC Smasher™ Combo All-American Bacon Triple SONIC Smasher. Across 3,354 locations it is sold at 112 different prices. The most common single price is $12.69, charged by 213 of them, and the full range runs from $9.89 to $17.39. The median is $12.79, which is what a drive-in in the middle of that spread charges.

An average would be dragged upward by the handful of locations at the top of that range. The median is not, which is why it is the figure printed as the typical price everywhere on this site. The full range is printed beside it so you can see how much room there is.

State and location figures

State pages use the same median, calculated over the locations in that state only. A state price is published only where at least five locations in that state sell the item, and a state is included in the ranking tables only where it has at least ten locations in the dataset. Below those thresholds a median stops describing a state and starts describing a handful of shops, so it is left out rather than printed with a caveat nobody reads.

How often it is rebuilt

The dataset is rebuilt weekly and every page carries the date of the build it was made from, in the footer and in the page's structured data. The current figures are from August 1, 2026. That date is read from the data itself, so a page cannot claim to be fresher than the numbers on it.

What this data cannot tell you

Stated plainly, because a source that only lists its strengths is not describing itself accurately.

• It is not your local price. It is the middle of a national spread, and your nearest drive-in may sit anywhere in the range shown beside it.
• It does not include tax, delivery fees, or the higher menu prices most delivery apps set.
• Limited time items appear and disappear faster than any weekly rebuild can follow.
• Promotional pricing, app-only offers and happy hour discounts are not in the store level prices.
• Calorie counts are as published by the chain, and preparation at a given location will vary.
• Coverage is not every Sonic in the country, and states with few locations in the dataset are excluded from comparisons rather than estimated.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match what you were charged, that is worth knowing and we would like to hear it. Send the page address, the item, what you paid and roughly where, through the contact page, or leave it as a comment on the page itself. Corrections are checked against the next rebuild.

Citing this data

The figures on this site are free to quote and reference with attribution to Sonic Menu Guide and a link to the page the figure came from. When quoting a price, quoting the date alongside it is worth doing, because a menu price without a date stops being true fairly quickly.

Independence

Sonic Menu Guide is an independent, unofficial publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Sonic Drive-In or Inspire Brands. Nobody pays for coverage here, advertising does not buy a favourable figure, and no price on this site is adjusted for any commercial reason. Read more about who publishes this.