In this paper, we study \(\alpha \) -biharmonic hypersurfaces in a Euclidean space. Using a Murnaghan–Nakayama type formula, we prove that any \(\alpha \) -biharmonic hypersurface of the 6-dimensional Euclidean space is either minimal or it has mean curvature and constant scalar curvature if \(\alpha >0\) , and it is minimal if \(\alpha \le 0\) . This extends a recent work (Fu et al. in Adv Math 383:107697, 2021) [16] and give further progress on a problem proposed by Chen in 1991. We also obtain an estimate of the mean curvature of \(\alpha \) -biharmonic hypersurfaces in a Euclidean space.