Methodology
Every figure on CPI Monitor comes from a published official series. CPI itself comes from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics index levels. Alternative measures come from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (PCE), the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (median and trimmed-mean CPI), the Treasury market (breakeven rates) and the University of Michigan survey, delivered through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Nothing is modelled or smoothed — we fetch the published values, then compute the changes ourselves so you can audit any number in an export.
What each family of series measures
- Official CPI — the Consumer Price Index published by the BLS. Everything in the monthly report, the forecast page and the budget calculator uses these series only.
- Alternative official measures — PCE and Core PCE (a broader, chain-weighted basket the Federal Reserve targets), and the Cleveland Fed's median and 16% trimmed-mean CPI (underlying-inflation cuts that drop outlier component moves instead of only food and energy). These are inflation measures, but they are not the CPI, so they are labelled separately.
- Inflation expectations — 5- and 10-year Treasury breakeven rates and the University of Michigan one-year household survey. These are forward-looking expectations, not measured inflation. They publish a percentage rather than an index level, so they appear only in the year-over-year view and never in index-level or forecast charts.
The math
- Year-over-year % = (index[m] − index[m−12]) / index[m−12] × 100
- Month-over-month % = (index[m] − index[m−1]) / index[m−1] × 100
- Contribution = category YoY × basket weight ÷ 100
- Δ 12mo = current YoY − YoY twelve months earlier
Index levels are not seasonally adjusted, so month-over-month moves include normal seasonal patterns. Year-over-year comparisons cancel them out.
Refresh cadence
The BLS releases CPI once a month, mid-morning Eastern. CPI Monitor re-polls the recent three-year window of every series every 20 minutes and rebuilds the dashboard from it, while deep history back to 1960 refreshes daily. Open dashboards also re-check every ten minutes, so a new release appears without a reload. If the API is unreachable, the last known good data is served and the header flags it.
Non-BLS series are re-checked hourly through FRED and fail independently, so an outage in one feed never removes the CPI lines. Basket weights are BLS relative-importance figures for the CPI-U and update annually.
Series identifiers
Copy any ID into the BLS data finder or FRED to verify a figure
| Series | Series ID | Role |
|---|---|---|
| BLS CPI-U | CUUR0000SA0 | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| Core CPI (ex food & energy) | CUUR0000SA0L1E | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| BLS CPI-W | CWUR0000SA0 | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| Chained C-CPI-U | SUUR0000SA0 | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| PCE price index | PCEPI | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (via FRED) |
| Core PCE (ex food & energy) | PCEPILFE | Index trend line · U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (via FRED) |
| Median CPI | MEDCPIM158SFRBCLE | Published rate · Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (via FRED) |
| 16% trimmed-mean CPI | TRMMEANCPIM158SFRBCLE | Published rate · Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (via FRED) |
| 5-year market expectation | T5YIE | Published rate · Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) |
| 10-year market expectation | T10YIE | Published rate · Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) |
| Household expectation (1yr) | MICH | Published rate · University of Michigan (via FRED) |
| Housing | CUUR0000SAH | Category breakdown · weight 44.9% |
| Food | CUUR0000SAF1 | Category breakdown · weight 13.6% |
| Transportation | CUUR0000SAT | Category breakdown · weight 16.4% |
| Medical care | CUUR0000SAM | Category breakdown · weight 8.1% |
| Energy | CUUR0000SA0E | Category breakdown · weight 6.4% |
| Apparel | CUUR0000SAA | Category breakdown · weight 2.5% |
| Recreation | CUUR0000SAR | Category breakdown · weight 5.4% |
| Education & comms. | CUUR0000SAE | Category breakdown · weight 5.8% |