Skip to Main Content

Inflation (Finance)

Information about economic inflation.

What is the Consumer Price Index (CPI)?

"The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services. Indexes are available for the U.S. and various geographic areas. Average price data for select utility, automotive fuel, and food items are also available."

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). CPI Home. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/.

What's in the (CPI) basket?

How is the CPI market basket determined?

The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2016 and 2017 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 2013 and 2014. In each of those years, about 24,000 consumers from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, another 12,000 consumers in each of these years kept diaries listing everything they bought during a 2-week period.

Over the 2 year period, then, expenditure information came from approximately 24,000 weekly diaries and 48,000 quarterly interviews used to determine the importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2020, November 25). Consumer Price Index Frequently Asked Questions. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_2.

CPI Data in Tables

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) maintains a web site with tools to find historical CPI data. The main page is here:

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

On that page if you choose "CPI Data" and from the pull-down menu choose "Databases" you will be offered a number of ways to view the CPI data. That page lists the following current indexes:

  • All Urban Consumers (Current Series)

  • Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (Current Series)

  • All Urban Consumers (Chained CPI)

  • Average Price Data

For each of the indexes, you can choose a view: Top Picks, One Screen Data, Multi Screen Data, Tables, Text Files. Top picks lets you choose from the various series. One screen data shows monthly data for the past decade [recommended view]. Multi Screen allows some choices; Tables includes the press releases; Text Files lets you download raw, unformatted data. The "Discontinued Data Series" allows you to retrieve series of CPI numbers which are no longer updated.