US consumer prices by component

What it is

CPI opens the US consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) broken into its main components: the headline and core, then food, energy, core goods, and core services split into shelter and services ex shelter. ECAN opens the same pane. It is free on every plan, signed in or not.

Each row shows the component's weight in the basket, its seasonally adjusted change on the month, its three- and six-month changes annualised, its unadjusted change on a year ago, and its contribution in percentage points to the headline's monthly and yearly change. All items and core stay on top; click a column header to sort the rest, for example by monthly contribution to see what moved the headline. Selecting a row charts its monthly changes as columns and its year-over-year change as a line over the last five years, with the headline's year-over-year change for reference. A one-line read under the chart says the same in words, worked out from those numbers by fixed rules, for example "Shelter added 0.09 points to the 0.4% rise and is 35% of the basket; up 3.0% over the year."

Rows

How each number is worked out

• Month: the change in the seasonally adjusted index from the month before, from index levels to three decimals, so it shows two decimals where the release rounds to one (0.26% where BLS prints 0.3).
• 3M and 6M annualised: the seasonally adjusted change over three or six months, compounded to a year: (index now / index then)^(12 / months) - 1.
• Y/Y: the change in the unadjusted index from the same month a year earlier, as BLS publishes it.
• Weight: the component's relative importance, its share of the all items basket in percent, for the month before the data month, as printed in tables 1, 6 and 7 of the release (July 2026 for the August 2026 data). BLS updates the underlying expenditure weights each January (every two years before 2023); between updates a component's relative importance drifts with its price relative to the rest, which is why the month before is used rather than December's.
• Contribution, month and year: BLS's own "effect on All Items" from the release's 1-month analysis table (table 6, seasonally adjusted) and 12-month analysis table (table 7, unadjusted), in percentage points. They are BLS figures, computed from unrounded indexes. A quick estimate of the same thing, weight times change (35.3% x 0.26% is about 0.09 points for shelter), is only an approximation: weights drift with relative prices, the year-over-year span crosses a January weight update, and seasonally adjusted aggregates are not exact weighted sums of adjusted components. The pane never shows that estimate in place of BLS's figure; until tables 6 and 7 are read for a month, the columns are empty.
• Services ex shelter is not a BLS series; Gloom computes it. Its weight and contributions are core services' less shelter's, which is exact because BLS weights and effects add up. Its index is built month by month as (k x change in core services - change in shelter) / (k - 1), where k is how many times bigger core services are than shelter in the basket at the start of the month: the ratio of their December relative importance, carried forward by each index's unadjusted move since that December. The same method rebuilds BLS's published core goods index from core and core services to within 0.002 points of its year-over-year change in each of 68 months. Its seasonally adjusted monthly changes are an approximation: BLS adjusts its aggregates separately, and the same check on core goods differs from the published adjusted change by 0.04 points in an average month and up to 0.12. The series starts in December 2019, the first month the published December tables cover.

There is no October 2025 index: BLS did not collect October prices during the 2025 lapse in appropriations. Changes that need that month (November 2025 on the month, and the three- and six-month and year-over-year changes that start in it) are left empty, never filled in.

The weights come from the release tables and from BLS's yearly relative importance tables, the December page for each year (December 2020 onward), which services ex shelter needs.

Release schedule

The header line gives the month the data covers, when that release came out, and when the next one is due, all on BLS's clock (Eastern). The dates and times are read once a day from BLS's CPI release schedule; nothing is assumed. BLS lists the current year's releases and adds the next year's late in the year, so after the last listed release the header has no next date until BLS publishes one.

Gloom Cloud reads the release's table 1 from the scheduled time, every five minutes for the first hour and less often after that, and tables 6 and 7 once table 1 shows the new month, so the new month usually shows within minutes of 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Index levels come from the BLS Public Data API (version 1, which needs no registration) in two queries of 25 series once the new month is out; the API allows an address 25 queries a day, and Gloom Cloud keeps to eight. If the API refuses a query, it is not asked again until the next day and the series FRED mirrors are read from FRED instead (all but motor vehicle insurance, recreation services and education and communication services). Until the index levels arrive, the month's and year's changes show as the release prints them, rounded to one decimal.

Commands and tools

Data and attribution

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average: the CPI news release tables 1, 6 and 7, the relative importance tables, the release schedule, and the BLS Public Data API, retrieved on each release day (the structured report's retrievedAt gives the time). BLS data are in the public domain. BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov. The services ex shelter row, the annualised rates and the reads are Gloom's calculations from BLS data, not BLS figures.