How much the '12 Days of Christmas' will cost you with 2022's inflation (2024)

by: Carl Aldinger

Posted: Dec 15, 2022 / 02:33 PM EST

Updated: Dec 15, 2022 / 03:05 PM EST

(WETM) – This year’s record inflation has touched just about everyone. And if you were thinking of buying all of the items in the “12 Days of Christmas” song, well… expect to shell out a hefty amount.

PNC Bank, based in Pittsburgh, released its annual “Christmas Price Index“, adding up the twelve items from the partridge to the drummers. All in all, the total price of one set of each item is up more than 10% from last year.

By far, the cheapest items on the list are the milkmaids, with PNC using the $7.25 federal minimum wage as the cost of their hire. However, other human-based gifts cost well over $10,000.

With so many animals on the list, PNC said higher feed costs are a huge part of the price hike this year. Plus, the price of gold rings spiked 40% in 2022, the highest increase of any item on the list.

The full list of items, with the percentage increase from 2021, is below:

1. Partridge in a pear tree: $280.18 (+25.8%)
2. Two turtledoves: $600 (+33.3%)
3. Three french hens: $318.75 (+25%)
4. Four calling birds: $599.96 (0.0%)
5. Five gold rings: $1,245 (+39.1%)
6. Six geese-a-laying: $720 (+9.1%)
7. Seven swans-a-swimming: $13,124.93 (+0.0%)
8. Eight maids-a-milking: $58 (0.0%)
9. Nine ladies dancing: $8,308.12 (+10%)
10. Ten lords-a-leaping: $13,980 (+24.2%)
11. Eleven Pipers Piping: $3,021.40 (+2.6%)
12. Twelve Drummers Drumming: $3,266.93 (+2.6%)

Grand Total: $45,523.27 (+10.5%)

However, in the song, each day the True Love buys another set of each gift from all the days before. This means by the 12th day of Christmas, the True Love has bought 12 partridges in pear trees, 22 turtledoves, 30 french hens, etc.

This amounts to a whopping total of 364 individual items. Buying all those gifts over and over is going to cost you a grand total of $194,951.59.

“Even with its small basket of goods and services, the PNC Christmas Price Index is not immune to the rising costs in the broader U.S. economy, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index,” the company said.