Consumer prices · 409 categories · latest 2026-09-01
The same category from more than one publisher. The national statistics office is the record; the IMF's series are its own compilation and can differ in definition, coverage and vintage.
BLS publishes both; the adjusted series exists for about a third of the items.
Frequencies are separate source series, not interchangeable observations. Annual measures retain their source definitions.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) (as of 2026-09-03); International Monetary Fund (as of 2026-09-24). Computed here, not published: ratio of the index to the previous month; ratio of the index to the same month one year earlier. Collected by Living Inflation Data, HBS Innovations in Economic Measurement (IEM) Lab www.iemlab.org.
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How the selected source divides its 100% consumer basket. Select a bar to reveal the next level.
7 recorded findings for this country, shown exactly as in the full quality register.
| Country | Source | Periods | Status | Series | Found | Detected by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | BLS | 1913-12-01, 1914-12-01, 1935-03-01, 1936-09-01, 1951-12-01, 1963-03-01, 1963-12-01, 1968-05-01 | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_* | 2026-09-02 | Series stops and later resumes |
| Not gaps in a monthly series: a monthly series that used to be quarterly. 47 items are affected and the cadence is visible in the periods themselves -- SAF116 runs 1952-12, 1953-03, 1953-06, 1953-09, 1953-12, 1954-03 and so on, a clean three-month step, before becoming monthly later. SA0L1 starts 1935-03, 1935-07, 1935-10, 1936-01: quarterly with the ragged spacing of the period. BLS files all of them as periodicity 'R' (monthly) with period codes M03, M06, M09 and M12, so they are stored as monthly series with holes, which is what they are -- the value in M03 1953 is a March observation, not a first-quarter average, and converting them to quarterly here would be exactly the frequency conversion this system does not do. The check is right that the data is absent and right that it resumes; the answer is that the source published less often then, which is not a suspension and not a defect. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | 1990-01-01, 2008-11-01, 2008-12-01, 2020-04-01 | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SETB_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SETB01_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SETB02_* +6 more | 2026-09-02 | Possible index rebasing, Single-month index anomaly |
| Real commodity price collapses, and the shape proves it. In November 2008 unleaded regular fell 31.7% in a month (278.70 -> 190.22) and fell another 21.2% in December; midgrade, premium, gasoline all types, motor fuel, other motor fuels and energy commodities all fell together, in both the adjusted and unadjusted series, which is 16 flags for one event. That is the signature of a commodity moving, not of a base change: a re-referencing lands on one series and its own subtree, while this lands on every series that contains gasoline and on nothing that does not -- the all-items index falls 1.7% in the same month, which is what a 30% fall in a 5% weight looks like after dilution. The level also keeps falling rather than stepping once and holding. Same story for fuel oil in January 1990, which spiked on the invasion of Kuwait and gave it back, and for gasoline in April 2020. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | whole series | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SEFL_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SEFL01_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SEFL02_* +4 more | 2026-09-02 | Possible index rebasing, Single-month index anomaly |
| Seasonal produce doing what seasonal produce does, and the second independent confirmation of ROADMAP item 16. Thirty flags across sixty years on lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, eggs, fresh vegetables and fresh whole chicken -- 1935 to 1996, scattered, no two in the same month, every one of them a spike or a trough that reverses. Neither defect the checks look for is present: a base change is permanent and these return, and a single bad cell happens once where these happen every few years. The measurement settles it. Deviation from the midpoint of a month's neighbours, over the whole history held: the all-items index has a MEDIAN of 0.13% and a worst month of 2.4% in 1,360 months; lettuce has a median of 4.32% and a worst of 45.9%, tomatoes 4.23% and 47.7%, potatoes 1.59% and 36.0%. Lettuce's typical month therefore sits 33 times further from its neighbours than the headline's does. A fixed 20% rule cannot mean the same thing for both -- on the headline it would never fire at all, and on lettuce it selects ordinary seasonality. The UK showed this at COICOP subclass depth on the same day; this is the same finding from a different source and a different classification. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | 1999-05-01, 1999-06-01, 2021-01-01, 2022-11-01 | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SS62032_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SSFV031A_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SEEE03_* | 2026-09-02 | Possible index rebasing, Single-month index anomaly |
| Three real events, each in one item. Admission to sporting events fell 22.6% in January 2021, when stadiums were closed and the index was being priced off whatever was still on sale. Food at elementary and secondary schools fell 24.1% in November 2022, at the end of the universal free school meals programme, and the same index had already been suspended for five months in 2020 when schools shut -- see usa-item-suspensions. Internet services fell 25.0% in May 1999 and kept falling, which is the dial-up price war; BLS had introduced the index only in December 1997. None of the three is a base change: each is confined to one item while its parents move normally. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | whole series | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SS62032_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SS62011_*, USA.CPI_BLS_US_*_SS10011_* +30 more | 2026-09-02 | Series stops and later resumes |
| Individual items BLS stopped publishing and later resumed, correctly reported. 46 flags over 33 item codes from 1998 to 2025, and the gaps are real in the source: checked against the raw flat files, BLS simply publishes no row for those months. Those are the original detector's counts, not an exhaustive calendar audit. The 2026-10-04 independent source-row review corrects the old prose's one-month offset: the 16-month leased cars/trucks gap is February 2021-May 2022; the five school-food months are April-August 2020; the six sporting-event months are July-December 2020. The original prose named the preceding observed month as the gap's start. Source absence is verified; a specific cause for each interruption is not inferred merely from a missing row. BLS explains that temporary sample inadequacy can prevent publication. Exact reviewed dates, including isolated recent absences, are now recorded by usa-source-published-calendar-gaps-20260922. Its finite date list, not this historical detector ruling, governs the national-detail calendar audit; new missing dates still fail. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | 2025-10-01, 2025-11-01 | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_* | 2026-09-24 | Most of a source disappears for one month |
| This is a source-published absence, not a connector defect. The 2025 lapse in federal appropriations stopped normal BLS CPI data collection from October 1 through November 12. BLS says it could not retrospectively collect the October survey data, so it did not publish October indexes for most series; a small number of nonsurvey indexes were recovered later. Collection resumed on November 14, leaving November coverage partial and many November one-month changes unavailable because their October comparison was missing. The published replica contains 2,086 BLS observations for September, 61 for October, 1,389 for November and 2,363 for December 2025. The source-level coverage-collapse check detects this synchronized one-month loss even though the per-series frequency-gap check deliberately requires three consecutive missing months. The automated flag is settled by this reviewed BLS explanation. | ||||||
| United States | BLS | whole series | suppressed | USA.CPI_BLS_US_NSA_SA0L1_*.M, USA.CPI_BLS_US_NSA_SA0L2_*.M, USA.CPI_BLS_US_NSA_SAA_*.M +114 more | 2026-10-04 | Series stops and later resumes |
| An independent scan of all eleven BLS topic files in immutable snapshot 20260922T123128Z matches all 383,020 stored monthly index cells across 723 series exactly: zero missing, extra or changed cells, and zero conflicts among 30,359 duplicated source rows. The 8,308 additional interior omissions across 117 index series are also absent from the union of the source files, not lost by parser ownership or ingestion. The exact series/date pairs and source-file SHA-256 hashes are recorded in reviewed_gaps/bls-cu-20260922.json; new holes are not covered. These include sparse early histories, seasonal item absences and temporary interruptions. Their classification is source-published absence, not an unsupported assertion that every missing month has the same cause. BLS's history and publication FAQ describe changing collection schedules and temporary sample inadequacy. Preserve the source calendar and never interpolate or re-label dated monthly observations as quarterly averages. Derived rates are unavailable when either exact calendar input is absent; the audit checks that lineage separately, requiring review of every absent input. | ||||||