Consumer Price Index (CPI)

Description

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. Prices for the goods and services used to calculate the CPI are collected in 75 urban areas throughout the country and from about 23,000 retail and service establishments. Data on rents are collected from about 43,000 landlords or tenants. More information and details about the data provided can be found at http://www.bls.gov/cpi

Resources

Name Format Description Link
21 CPI Data sources https://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm
0 CPI -- All Urban Consumer data in tab separated files The CPI represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households. User fees (such as water and sewer service) and sales and excise taxes paid by the consumer are also included. Income taxes and investment items (like stocks, bonds, and life insurance) are not included. The CPI-U includes expenditures by urban wage earners and clerical workers, professional, managerial, and technical workers, the self-employed, short-term workers, the unemployed, retirees and others not in the labor force. https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/cu/
0 CPI Average Price data tab separated files The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also publishes average retail prices for select utility, automotive fuel, and food items. Although average prices are calculated from the price observations collected for the CPI, they serve a different purpose. The CPI measures price change while average prices provide estimates of price levels. Specifically, average prices are estimates of the average price paid by the consumer for a good or service. At the U.S. level, the BLS publishes approximately 70 average prices for food items, 6 for utility gas (natural gas) and electricity, and 5 for automotive fuels. If the sample size is sufficient, all average prices are also published at the four major geographic regions--Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/ap/
0 The Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, was introduced with the release of July data in August 2002. Designated the C-CPI-U, the index supplements the existing Consumer Price Indexes already produced by the BLS: the CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and the CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). The C-CPI-U employs a Tornqvist formula and utilizes expenditure data in adjacent time periods in order to reflect the effect of any substitution that consumers make across item categories in response to changes in relative prices. The new measure is designed to be a closer approximation to a "cost-of-living" index than the present measures. The use of expenditure data for both a base period and the current period in order to average price change across item categories distinguishes the C-CPI-U from the existing CPI measures, which use only a single expenditure base period to compute the price change over time. https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/su/

Tags

  • cpi-index
  • cpi
  • inflation
  • consumer-prices

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