Consumer Price Index (CPI)

The primary US inflation measure, tracking price changes for a basket of consumer goods and services. Published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Annual CPI change is the headline "inflation rate" most commonly reported.

This series is published by BLS via FRED (CPIAUCSL) and refreshed on a monthly cadence. CalcFi mirrors the underlying observation stream hourly so the chart, current value, and historical statistics above reflect the most recent figure released by the primary source. The 10-year window shown is bounded only by data availability — for indicators with longer histories, the source link provides the full archive going back to series inception.

Why this number matters in everyday personal finance: most household money decisions — taking out a loan, opening a savings account, refinancing a mortgage, deciding when to lock a rate, choosing between fixed and variable products, sizing an emergency fund — depend on the prevailing level of one or more macro indicators. CPI is one of the inputs that shifts the math. A small move at the top of the rate stack (Fed funds, Treasury yields, CPI prints) compounds into materially different monthly payments and lifetime interest costs at the household level. The chart above shows the trend; the calculators linked below convert the current reading into a personal dollar figure for your specific situation.

Common misinterpretations to avoid: the latest single observation is rarely the "forecast" — it is the most recent published value. Series with monthly or quarterly cadence may lag the current economic environment by 4 to 8 weeks because of measurement and revision lag. Index-level series (CPI, PCE) are reported as levels; the inflation rate everyone talks about is the year-over-year percent change of that level. Yield curves invert and steepen on relative movement between maturities — looking at any single yield in isolation tells you less than comparing two. And short-term volatility around a central bank meeting or major data release is normal and not a regime change on its own.

Data licensing: CalcFi publishes the mirrored series under CC-BY-4.0 — free to reuse with attribution. Distributions exist on Kaggle, Datahub, Figshare, Zenodo, OSF, and Harvard Dataverse; see /open-data for permanent DOIs.