One cart of goods. 26 years.
No substitutions.
Official inflation lets the basket change — when steak gets expensive, it assumes you switch to chicken. This index doesn't. It prices the same 17 categories of everyday life every month since January 2000, from primary sources, using zero BLS CPI series. Here is the whole machine, opened up.
What's in it, and how much it counts
Every tile is one category. Area is its share of a household's spending in 2000 — frozen there permanently, which is what makes the basket fixed. Colour is how fast its price has actually moved since. Select any tile to open it up.
How 17 categories become one number
Each category contributes its weight × its price change. Add them up and you get the headline, almost exactly. The small residual is the chain-link — what happens when a category enters or leaves the basket partway through, spliced so the level never jumps.
Where each category's data starts and stops
A fixed basket is only as good as its coverage, so here is all of it. Bars show each category's real data window. Anything starting after 2000 is chain-linked in; anything ending early has a source that stopped publishing and has dropped out of recent months. No gap is ever interpolated — a missing month stays missing.
Inflation isn't one number. It's your number.
The headline describes an average household that may look nothing like yours. Move the sliders to match where your money actually goes — the rate on the right is what those categories really did.
From a price tag to the headline
Every number on this page traces back through these five steps to a published source. Follow one pair of jeans through it.
Find a published price
A source that prints an actual transaction price and keeps printing it. No survey indexes, no CPI.
Pull it, check it
An automated job fetches it, range-checks the value, and stamps it with the basket version it belongs to.
Turn price into ratio
Divide by the same good's January 2000 price. Units cancel, so dollars-per-gallon and dollars-per-Btu both work.
Weight it, add it up
Multiply each category's ratio by its frozen 2000 share of spending, and sum all 17.
Chain-link the seams
When a category enters or exits, splice at the join so the level never jumps — only the growth rate carries through.
Go deeper
See every source and weight on the basket page, the load-bearing choices on the methodology page, or pull the numbers yourself from the JSON API.