Inflation is not a number — it is 400 of them, measured in
58 different places. This is the U.S. consumer price index taken apart: every item
stratum the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes, in every area it publishes one for, month by
month from 1997-01 to 2026-06.
935,137 observations across 4,035 series. Pick an
item, pick the places you want to compare, and the chart is rebuilt from the panel itself —
with the underlying rows downloadable as CSV or Parquet.
What’s in here, and what isn’t
The panel covers 1997-01 onward. Deeper history exists, but only in a
separate and materially staler vintage: a mirror of the same CPI concept reaching back to
1913-01 and stopping at 2025-06 —
452,591 observations. Those two vintages ship as two files and are
never merged into one line. If you need the long view, take the older one — and say on
your own chart that that is what it is.
The main panel begins in 1997. Anything earlier comes only from the separate long-history vintage, which is materially older.
Item detail is uneven. The four census regions carry the full set of items; large metropolitan areas carry fewer, and smaller areas carry the all-items index only. Several smaller areas are published twice a year or every other month rather than monthly, so their lines are sparser by design.
The Bureau's own item-hierarchy table is not held here, so items are shown as a flat list of recovered names rather than as a tree of categories and sub-categories.
Four consolidated metropolitan areas that the Bureau retired in its 2018 geographic revision survive in the source as a couple of stray observations each, with no all-items series. They are listed below rather than quietly dropped, but they cannot be charted.
The retired areas, named here rather than quietly dropped:
A213 Cincinnati-Hamilton, OH-KY-IN (2 obs); A214 Kansas City, MO-KS (2 obs); A212 Milwaukee-Racine, WI (2 obs); A425 Portland-Salem, OR-WA (2 obs).
How the geography was recovered
The source panel arrived with every one of its 935,137 rows labelled
“national”, while the series identifiers carried 58 real area codes. The
area names themselves are not distributed in any lookup table this project holds, so they were
recovered from the Bureau’s own series titles, which name the area in a fixed position.
Six area codes are checked against independently-known values on every build, and the build
fails rather than ship a label it cannot verify. Full method:
Methodology.