How fast are prices rising — and who feels it?
Headline and core consumer prices, what is driving them at the category level, and whether paychecks are keeping up — all computed from BLS CPI-U and payroll-survey data.
3.5% YoY
62nd percentile of all readings since 1948
Jun 2026
Definition. Year-over-year percent change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), all items, seasonally adjusted.
How to read it. The broadest gauge of the cost of living. It includes volatile food and energy prices, so single readings can swing on commodity moves.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED (CPIAUCSL) · Latest: Jun 2026
2.6% YoY
45th percentile of all readings since 1958
Jun 2026
Definition. CPI-U excluding food and energy, year over year. Strips out the two most volatile categories to expose the underlying trend.
How to read it. The measure policymakers watch for persistence. When core runs above headline, the volatile categories are masking, not driving, inflation.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED (CPILFESL) · Latest: Jun 2026
3.5% YoY
67th percentile of readings since 2007
Jun 2026
Definition. Year-over-year growth in average hourly earnings of all private-sector employees, from the BLS payroll survey.
How to read it. Nominal pay growth in dollars. On its own it says nothing about living standards — it has to be compared against inflation, which the next card does.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CES) via FRED (CES0500000003) · Latest: Jun 2026
0.1% YoY
30th percentile since 2007 (derived series)
Jun 2026
Definition. Wage growth deflated by headline CPI inflation using the exact ratio form (1 + wage growth) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, not the subtraction shortcut.
How to read it. The purchasing-power test: positive means the average paycheck buys more than a year ago; negative means prices are outrunning pay.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CES) via FRED (CES0500000003) · Latest: Jun 2026
Year-over-year percent change, monthly, since 2000 · % YoY
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED (CPIAUCSL, CPILFESL) · Jan 2000–Jun 2026
Year-over-year inflation by major CPI category, sorted fastest-rising first, with the same month one year earlier for comparison. Averages hide a lot: households that rent, drive, or face medical bills experience very different inflation rates from the headline number.
| Category | YoY, Jun 2026 | YoY, one year earlier | Change (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energycpi_energy | 15.5% | -0.6% | +16.1 |
| Sheltercpi_shelter | 3.3% | 3.8% | -0.6 |
| Foodcpi_food | 3.0% | 3.0% | 0.0 |
| Rent of primary residencerent_primary_residence | 2.8% | 3.8% | -0.9 |
| Medical carecpi_medical | 2.0% | 2.7% | -0.7 |
A note on shelter: the CPI shelter and rent indexes measure what all tenants are paying, not what new leases are signed at. Since most leases reprice only once a year, a jump or drop in market asking rents takes roughly a year to eighteen months to work through the full stock of leases and show up here. Shelter is therefore the slowest-moving large component of CPI — it kept headline inflation elevated well after market rents had cooled, and it understates rent pressure early in a rental boom.
Year-over-year percent change, monthly, since 2016 · % YoY
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED (CES0500000003, CPIAUCSL) · Jan 2016–Jun 2026
When the dashed inflation line sits above the wage line, the average paycheck is losing ground in real terms. The longest such stretch in this window ran from Apr 2021 through Apr 2023 — 25 consecutive months in which prices grew faster than pay, an erosion of purchasing power that compounding made worse than any single month suggests. As of Jun 2026, real wage growth stands at +0.1% — pay is currently outpacing prices, though the gap is measured against a base that inflation has already reset higher.
Pick a starting year and a monthly budget. The calculator uses the actual CPI-U index path — annual averages for the start year, the latest monthly index for today — to show what that budget still buys and what income it would take to match it now.
Between $100 and $1,000,000; out-of-range values are clamped.
Compared against the latest CPI reading (Jun 2026).
CPI vintages used. 2019 annual average: 255.7 · Jun 2026: 332.6 (index, 1982–84 = 100). BLS CPI-U via FRED (CPIAUCSL), retrieved 2026-07-18.
Assumptions. Uses the national CPI-U all-items basket for urban consumers, seasonally adjusted. Your own inflation rate depends on what you buy and where you live — renters, drivers, and households with large medical costs can differ substantially from this average.
All inflation figures on this page are year-over-year percent changes in seasonally adjusted CPI-U indexes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computed as (index today ÷ index twelve months earlier − 1) × 100. Real wage growth deflates average hourly earnings by headline CPI using the exact ratio form rather than simple subtraction, which matters when rates are large. Percentile context lines rank the latest reading against each series’ full published history using a midrank convention.
What CPI-U captures: the average price change of a fixed-weight basket of goods and services purchased by urban consumers, covering roughly 90 percent of the U.S. population, with substitution handled by geometric means within item categories. What it does not capture: rural households; any individual household’s actual basket — renters, drivers, and people with heavy medical spending face materially different inflation rates than the average; the cost of buying a house, which enters only indirectly through owners’ equivalent rent; and quality change, which BLS adjusts for imperfectly. Shelter measures lag market rents by a year or more by construction.
Average hourly earnings is a workforce-composition-sensitive measure: when low-wage workers lose jobs disproportionately (as in 2020), the average rises mechanically without anyone getting a raise. It covers private-sector employees only and excludes benefits. The purchasing-power calculator assumes the national CPI-U basket throughout; a household’s true experience depends on what it actually buys and where it lives.