United States — Monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI-U)

Methodology

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) measures the average change over time in the prices urban consumers pay for a fixed basket of goods and services: housing, food, transportation, medical care, apparel, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services. Each value is the US city average all-items index for the month, with the 1982–84 average set to 100, as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the not-seasonally-adjusted index, the one BLS uses for annual averages and that is not revised once published. The series runs monthly from January 1913. October 2025 was not published, because prices were not collected during the 2025 lapse in federal appropriations, and is left out rather than filled. BLS's annual average for a year is the mean of its published months (for 2025, eleven). Values come from the BLS CPI time-series file and are cross-checked against the BLS Public Data API for the latest two years. CK Economics uses this index for the constant-dollar option on its US-dollar series that are not wholly inside the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim area (those use the Los Angeles area index): each value is multiplied by the average index of the latest complete year and divided by the index of its own month (or the average of its own year, calendar or federal fiscal, for annual series).

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Source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), All items in U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted (CUUR0000SA0): https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/cu/cu.data.1.AllItems and https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0 — figures as published on 15 October 2026.