How much does the average engagement ring cost in the United States?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the wedding figure from this site and apply a fraction. A wedding averages in the low tens of thousands, and the ring is a substantial but minority item within the overall commitment — somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of it. That gives a figure in the low thousands.

The skew in the explanation is the same correction as the wedding question: nearly two-thirds of couples spend under six thousand, so a handful of very expensive rings pull the average above what most people pay. The median is the number that describes a typical purchase, and the mean is the number that gets published.

The recent fall is the more interesting movement: down substantially from a peak two years earlier. Prices for this category are shaped by marketing conventions rather than by material cost, so the figure responds to changing norms about how much a ring should cost — which is exactly what the long-running "two months' salary" guideline was invented to fix in place.