Spicy Chicken McNuggets Are Back September 1: Where to Buy, Sizes and What They'll Cost (2026)

McDonald’s has confirmed the date. What it has not done is tell anyone what the things cost — and the gap between those two facts is most of what is worth knowing here.

When do Spicy Chicken McNuggets come back?

September 1, 2026, at participating McDonald’s restaurants nationwide, for a limited time. That comes from McDonald’s own USA Menu Spotter page, which was updated on 25 August and carries the item under a “09.01.2026” heading. The company’s wording is that they are “returning to participating McDonald’s restaurants nationwide starting September 1, but only for a limited time.”

Mighty Hot Sauce returns alongside them.

Two phrasings worth flagging, because they are everywhere in the coverage and are not McDonald’s words: several outlets say the nuggets will be available “while supplies last”, and several give a specific set of sizes. The company’s own entry says neither.

What is actually in them, and what is Mighty Hot Sauce?

The nuggets are the standard Chicken McNugget under a spicy tempura coating; the sauce is a separate returning item. McDonald’s describes the coating as “a spicy tempura coating made with a blend of aged cayenne and chili peppers”.

Mighty Hot Sauce it describes as “crushed red pepper, spicy chilis, savory garlic and a hint of sweetness”. It is a dipping sauce, ordered alongside, not something the nuggets arrive coated in — which matters if you are buying for someone who wants the heat dialled down, because the nugget and the sauce are two separate decisions.

What sizes will Spicy Chicken McNuggets come in?

McDonald’s has not said, but the regular McNuggets line-up is 4, 6, 10, 20 and 40 pieces. Those five all have live product pages on McDonald’s US site. Two invented sizes tested on the same URL pattern — 7-piece and 13-piece — return 404s, so that list is the real menu rather than the site answering politely to anything.

Most coverage says the spicy version will come in 6, 10, 20 and 40, dropping the 4-piece, which is the Happy Meal size. That is entirely plausible — the 4-piece exists mainly to sit in a Happy Meal — but it is not in McDonald’s announcement, and this page has not verified which sizes earlier runs used. Treat it as likely rather than confirmed until the boards go up.

How much will Spicy Chicken McNuggets cost?

Nobody can tell you, including the sites that appear to. McDonald’s published no price with the announcement, and its menu and product pages carry calories but no figures — the 10-piece McNuggets page lists 410 Cal and nothing else.

That leaves the menu-price aggregators, and they do not survive being checked against each other. Three of them — hackthemenu, knowmenuprices and mac-menus — gave these figures for regular McNuggets on 29 August:

Those are not three sources. All three return the same five numbers to the cent, and not one of them states when the prices were collected or which restaurant they came from.

A fourth site, menupricetracker, is the only one of the four claiming an August 2026 update. It lists just one McNuggets size — the 20-piece, at $4.99. The other three have that same item at $7.00, which is 40% higher. On the single product where all four overlap, they are $2.01 apart.

There is also something odd inside the shared set: it has the 20-piece at $7.00 and the 10-piece at $5.79, which would make doubling your order cost $1.21. Whatever that number is, it is not a price somebody read off a menu board recently.

Why can’t anyone tell you the price?

Because McDonald’s restaurants are overwhelmingly franchised, and franchisees set their own prices. McDonald’s says so itself in the small print across its own site — “Prices and participation may vary” — and the practical effect is that there is no national number for most of the menu to report.

The useful check on that is what McDonald’s does when there is a national price. On the very same Menu Spotter page, a few entries below the nuggets, it writes that the Caesar Snack Wrap is “Available nationally for $2.99.” The company prints the figure when the figure exists. For Spicy Chicken McNuggets it did not, and that absence is information rather than an omission somebody else can fill in.

The only price that will be true for you is the one in your own McDonald’s app with your restaurant selected, and it will be there before you pay.

Where can you buy them?

At participating McDonald’s restaurants nationwide — in store, through the app for pickup, or on McDelivery. There is no exclusive retailer or limited market to work around here; “participating” is the only qualifier McDonald’s attaches.

Ordering in the app is worth the small friction beyond seeing your real price: McDonald’s is currently running app-only offers, including free medium fries with a $1 minimum purchase once a week through 4 October, and a $1-minimum free Big Mac for first-time app users. Delivery is the expensive route by design — McDonald’s warns on its own site that delivery prices may be higher than in restaurants, before fees.

Is this the same as the 2020 launch?

Same product, different event, and the six-year-old pages are still ranking. McDonald’s introduced Spicy Chicken McNuggets in the US on 16 September 2020, announced in a company article dated 26 August 2020. That page is still live, still says September 16, and still surfaces high in searches for this product.

If you land on a page telling you the nuggets arrive in mid-September, check its date before you plan a trip around it. The 2026 return is 1 September — fifteen days earlier in the month, and six years later.