Why Is Wagyu So Expensive? Seven in Ten Steers Grade A5

Of the 280,162 Wagyu steers graded in Japan in 2025, 71.7 percent came out A5, the top mark for both meat yield and meat quality. In 1995 the share was 16.9 percent. Both shares are calculated from the yearly counts of the Japan Meat Grading Association.

The top grade has become the ordinary outcome for a Wagyu steer in Japan, so the grade’s rarity cannot explain the price. The cost of making the beef can.

Why is wagyu so expensive?

Wagyu is expensive because it is costly to produce. A Japanese fattening farm pays a high price for a calf bred to marble, about half what the finished steer will sell for, then feeds it a mostly imported grain ration from about 11 months until slaughter at 28 to 30 months, while fat builds inside the muscle.

A5 is two grades written side by side

The letter grades yield: A goes to carcasses whose estimated yield of usable cuts scores 72 or more on the grading association’s formula. The number grades quality on four items, marbling, meat color, firmness and texture, and fat, and the carcass takes its lowest score, under the association’s beef standard.

A 5 needs marbling of at least No. 8 on the 12-step Beef Marbling Standard. The standard applies to every breed.

Kobe beef does not even need A5. Its rules ask for purebred Tajima cattle bred, fattened and slaughtered in Hyogo Prefecture, a yield grade of A or B, a quality grade of 4 or better, marbling of No. 6 or higher and a carcass of no more than 499.9 kilograms.

The weight cap suits the Tajima strain, which runs small: Hyogo’s Japanese Black steers averaged 468.6 kilograms in the grading association’s 2025 survey, against 515.4 nationally, and the Kobe association says farmers believe a bigger animal would lose the breed’s fine texture. About 5,500 cattle a year are certified as Kobe, under 0.2 percent of the beef Japan eats, and the association counts that scarcity as part of the price.

The calf costs half a finished steer before fattening starts

In 2024 the average Wagyu steer sold by a Japanese fattening farm fetched 1,289,233 yen, according to the agriculture ministry’s production cost survey. The calf it started as, about nine months old when fattening began, was valued at 690,106 yen, more than half that.

Add feed, labor and the rest, and the full cost of raising each steer came to 1,375,264 yen, more than it sold for. In fiscal 2016 the same survey put the full cost at about 87 percent of the sale price.

A year and a half of mostly imported grain

Japanese Black cattle eat a high-energy diet two or three times a day from 11 months of age until slaughter, with concentrate rising to about 86 percent of the ration, according to a 2018 review of the industry led by Takafumi Gotoh of Kagoshima University. Each animal goes through 4,000 to 5,000 kilograms of feed while fattening, and more than 90 percent of the concentrate is imported. That is a long feed bill, though a short wait next to caviar, whose beluga sturgeon takes 14 to 20 years to mature.

The months matter because fat keeps building. In purebred Japanese Black cattle, fat inside the muscle rises in a straight line with slaughter age from about 17 months to more than 33, a second 2018 review notes. Holstein steers, the dairy breed, are normally fattened in Japan only until 20 to 22 months.

Japan has bred for more fat since beef imports were liberalized in 1991

Japan liberalized beef imports in 1991, and farmers and the government set out to produce “increasingly marbled beef” in response to “the serious threat posed by cheaper, imported, leaner beef,” the Gotoh review says. A 2026 study in Foods dates the breeding emphasis on marbling to the same liberalization.

The push worked: fat inside the loin of Japanese Black cattle has averaged more than 30 percent in recent years, and in Japanese sirloin it can reach 60 percent. In 2025 the average Japanese Black steer scored 9.2 on the 12-step marbling scale, the grading association’s survey shows, against 2.1 for dairy-breed steers and 4.3 for crossbreds.

Year	Wagyu steers graded A5
1995	16.9%
2005	15.5%
2015	31.3%
2020	49.5%
2025	71.7%

The yardstick moved too: a photographic marbling standard replaced the 1988 one in 2008, and after loin fat rose so fast, the grading association “was forced to further modify the marbling standard” in 2014.

The Japanese Black breed dates from 1944

Wagyu means Japanese cattle, the Kobe association explains, and the name covers four breeds: Japanese Black, Brown, Shorthorn and Polled. Ninety percent or more are Japanese Black, according to JETRO, Japan’s trade agency, which calls Wagyu “a breed created by repeated crossing of Japanese native cattle with imported breeds.”

In the early 1900s Japan crossed its native cattle with European breeds, among them Braunvieh, Simmental, Ayrshire, Devon, Shorthorn and Holstein, to make bigger draft and beef animals. Meat quality later slipped and the cattle grew too large, so the crossing stopped and the herd was bred within itself until the Japanese Black breed was established in 1944, the Gotoh review says. The breed is as much a product of crossing as cotton candy grapes, which began as a hand-pollinated cross in 2003.

Outside Japan, Wagyu grew from a few hundred cattle

The first Wagyu to reach the United States were four bulls imported by Morris Whitney in the mid-1970s, according to the American Wagyu Association. More shipments followed in the 1990s, and then, the AWA says, the Japanese government banned further exports of Wagyu semen, embryos and live cattle.

The AWA’s history page, quoting Wagyu International, counts 221 Wagyu cattle as the genetic base of all Wagyu in the United States, Canada and Australia. The Gotoh review, citing the same group, puts Japan’s exports at 248 cattle and more than 5,000 straws of frozen semen in all.

For breed, the AWA’s USDA-verified Authentic Wagyu program requires only that a calf have one registered Wagyu parent, sire or dam. Wagyu raised abroad cannot be shipped to Japan and sold there as Wagyu, JETRO says.

The massages and the beer are not standard practice

The popular story credits pampering: cattle massaged, fed beer and played music. The Kobe association allows that some farms rearing low numbers of cattle may be “doing things bordering on this,” but says those methods are not the standard for prime Kobe beef.

Music at feeding time can become a cue that “it is said, increases their appetite,” though its effect on meat quality “has not yet been proved.” And “there have been almost no cases of cows being raised on beer.”

The association credits massage with lowering stress and so helping the meat indirectly, then adds:

“Massage itself neither softens meat nor increases the amount of marbling,” the Kobe association says.

The Gotoh review describes a standard system that mentions none of it: Japanese Black cattle are “permanently housed in small pens and fed enormous quantities of concentrate.” The only beer product in its ration is beer bran, listed with hay and rice straw as roughage.

In 2007 the BBC reported on a farm in Cornwall, England, whose five Limousin cattle got through up to 40 pints of local beer a day, with regular massages, in a bid for Kobe-style beef.

The A5 share is still climbing: in the first half of 2026, 75.5 percent of the Wagyu steers graded in Japan made it. The price pays for the calf and the year and a half of grain it takes to get them there. Strictly FYI.