There is no single true inflation number. There are several, each measured a different way, and they often disagree. This page puts them on one chart so you can see where they disagree and why it matters.
Prices are 3.3% higher than they were a year ago. Leave out food and energy, which jump around a lot, and the rise is 2.5%. The measure the Fed watches most closely says 3.3%. The Fed is aiming for about 2%.
Hover any point to see the exact figures. You can show up to 5 lines at once, and picking a sixth drops whichever you chose first.
No figures were collected for October 2025. The solid line stops there and a faint dashed one carries across, so you can follow the shape without us inventing a reading.
Split the whole shopping list into four parts. The numbers below show how much of the last year of inflation each part is responsible for. They are in percentage points, so if inflation is 3 percent and housing shows 1.1, housing accounts for 1.1 of those 3 points. A minus number means that part pulled inflation down instead.
The four parts add up to +3.30 points, against inflation of 3.3%.
A part matters for two reasons: how much its own price moved, and how big a slice of your spending it is. Housing is about a third of the whole list, so it dominates this picture even in a quiet year. Something small like plane tickets can double in price and still barely register here.
Every measure, at the same moment, over four different lengths of time. The left column is the one people quote. The shorter columns pick up a change sooner, but they are also jumpier. A measure that looks calm over a year can already be moving in the last three months, and that is often the first hint that something has turned.
| MEASURE | OVER A YEAR | LAST 3 MONTHS | LAST 6 MONTHS | LAST MONTH | MONTH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supercore PCE | 3.9 | 4.3 | 3.6 | 3.6 | Jul 2026 |
| Headline PCE | 3.7 | 2.2 | 4.1 | 1.9 | Jul 2026 |
| Core PCE | 3.3 | 3.0 | 3.5 | 3.0 | Jul 2026 |
| Headline CPI | 3.3 | 0.5 | 3.8 | 0.9 | Jul 2026 |
| Core services CPI | 3.0 | 2.2 | 3.1 | 2.8 | Jul 2026 |
| CPI services less rent of shelter | 3.0 | 2.3 | 3.2 | 2.3 | Jul 2026 |
| Sticky-price core CPI | 2.7 | 2.3 | 2.8 | 3.5 | Jul 2026 |
| Median CPI | 2.7 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.1 | Jul 2026 |
| Supercore CPI our calculation | 2.6 | 2.1 | 2.8 | 4.3 | Jul 2026 |
| 16% trimmed-mean CPI | 2.6 | 2.0 | 2.7 | 2.7 | Jul 2026 |
| Core CPI | 2.5 | 1.6 | 2.4 | 2.6 | Jul 2026 |
| Trimmed-mean PCE | 2.3 | 2.2 | 2.4 | 2.2 | Jul 2026 |
| Sticky CPI less food, energy and shelter | 2.2 | 1.4 | 1.9 | 3.9 | Jul 2026 |
| Flexible-price core CPI | 1.1 | -2.4 | 0.7 | -2.2 | Jul 2026 |
| Core goods CPI | 0.8 | -0.0 | 0.4 | 2.4 | Jul 2026 |
Core inflation removes the same two things every month, food and energy, whether or not they were the odd ones out. The measures below work differently. They line every price up by how far it moved this month, then cut off both ends of that line. Cutting the ends off is what "trimming" means. The list of what gets cut is rebuilt every month, and nothing is banned for good.
The familiar one, and the odd one out on this list. It does not look at what prices did at all. It removes the same two groups every single month, by name.
Throws awayFood and energy, always, whether or not they were the odd ones out that month.
Good forA quick steadier read that everyone quotes. The rest of this list exists because "always the same two" is a rough rule.
Rank every price in the basket by how much it moved this month, weighted by how much people actually spend on it. Keep the single one sitting at the halfway point.
Throws awayEverything on both sides of the middle. It keeps one reading and discards the rest.
Good forThe steadiest line on this page. One category going wild can barely move it.
The same ranking, but it keeps the whole middle of the pack and averages it instead of keeping one point. It is built from 45 spending groups.
Throws awayThe bottom 8 percent and the top 8 percent, measured by share of spending rather than by counting items. That leaves 84 percent of the basket.
Good forCalmer than core, while still using most of what households buy.
The same idea applied to the wider basket, the one the 2 percent goal is written on.
Throws away24 percent off the bottom and 31 percent off the top, by share of spending, leaving 45 percent. The two ends are deliberately different sizes: that split was chosen by testing which one tracked the underlying trend best.
Good forJudging the trend on the same basket the target is set on.
Not a trim. It sorts the basket by how OFTEN each price changes, then keeps only the slow half. Food and energy come out as well.
Throws awayAnything whose price changes more often than once every 4.3 months.
Good forA shop that only reprices once a year has to guess at future inflation when it does. That guess is what this measure picks up.
The other half of that same sort: only the prices that change often, again without food and energy.
Throws awayAnything whose price changes less often than once every 4.3 months.
Good forSeeing what is reacting to the economy right now. It turns early and it is jumpy.
Sticky and flexible are the odd ones out here. The trims ask how far a price moved THIS month, so what gets cut changes every time. The sticky split asks how often a price changes at all, which is a settled fact about the item. Petrol is always flexible, even in a quiet month.
The number is how many months typically pass between one price change and the next. Anything slower than 4.3 months counts as slow.
| SLOW TO CHANGE | MONTHS | FAST TO CHANGE | MONTHS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eating out | 10.7 | Petrol | 0.7 |
| Rent | 11.0 | Fresh fruit and veg | 1.3 |
| Education | 11.1 | Gas and electricity | 1.6 |
| Medical care | 14.0 | Meat, fish and eggs | 1.9 |
| Car insurance | 5.9 | New cars | 2.0 |
| Haircuts and salons | 23.7 | Hotels | 3.1 |
Can you see which items got cut? For the wider basket, yes: the month’s included and excluded list is published as a spreadsheet every release. For the CPI trims only the rule is published, not the monthly casualty list. Either way the pattern is the same, and things with famously jumpy prices land in the cut ends far more often than something steady like rent.
So why not just drop food and energy every time? Because a fixed list quietly claims two things: that the removed items are always noise, and that everything kept is always signal. Neither is true. A one-off jump in something you kept, like a tax rise on tobacco, goes straight into the number, where a trim would have thrown it out.
Short answers, no jargon. You do not need any of this to read the chart, but it is here when a name on the list makes no sense.
There is no single true inflation number. Each one is measured a different way, and each answers a different question. Some tell you what your bills actually did. Others try to tell you where prices are going next. When two of them disagree, that gap is the interesting bit.
CPI follows the price of the things a normal household buys. Food, rent, petrol, a haircut, a bus fare. Every month thousands of these prices get checked, and the result is how much the whole shopping list moved. When the news says inflation is 3 percent, this is usually the number they mean.
Food and energy prices jump around for reasons nobody controls. Petrol, heating, electricity, and the weekly shop. A cold winter, a bad harvest, a war a long way away. Take those two out and you get a calmer number that is easier to read. That is core inflation. It is not your cost of living, because you still pay those bills. It is a signal, not a receipt.
Core takes out the same two things every single month, whether or not they were the odd ones out. Plenty of other prices swing about too. Plane tickets, second-hand cars, car insurance. Core leaves all of those in. That is why the other measures below exist.
Picture every price on the list lined up, from the biggest fall to the biggest rise. Trimming means crossing off the extremes at both ends and averaging what is left in the middle. The items you cross off change every month. One month it is eggs. The next it is plane tickets.
The median goes further. It throws away everything except the one price change sitting exactly in the middle of the line-up. It is the steadiest number on this page. It also tends to sit a little above the main figure, so judge it against its own past rather than straight against 2 percent.
The Fed’s 2 percent goal is set on a different measure, called PCE. Two things make it different. It lets your shopping list change when you change it: if beef gets expensive and you buy chicken instead, PCE notices. And it counts medical care paid for by insurers and government, not only what you hand over at the counter.
Mostly housing. Housing is about a third of the CPI list and a much smaller slice of PCE. So when rents move, CPI moves a lot more. Medical care pulls the other way, because PCE counts the bills your insurer pays and CPI does not.
Most renters sign up for a year, and their rent cannot change until that year is up. So when rents in the real world start rising or falling, it takes a long time to show up in the figures. Roughly a year behind, sometimes longer. If the housing line looks stuck, that is usually why.
Some prices change almost daily, like petrol. Others change about once a year, like your insurance. Splitting them apart is useful. The slow ones tend to show what businesses expect to happen next. The fast ones just react to what is happening right now.
Supercore is services with housing and energy taken out. Think haircuts, restaurants, repairs, childcare. People watch it because wages are the biggest cost of those things, so it should show whether pay rises are pushing prices up. It caught on after a Fed speech in late 2022. Since then the link to the jobs market has looked weaker than people hoped.
Year over year compares this month with the same month a year ago. That is what most people mean by inflation. It is also a twelve-month window, so it is always partly a story about last year. The shorter windows turn faster. They are noisier too, so one strange month can mislead you.
The short windows answer one question: if the last few months carried on like that for a whole year, where would inflation end up? It puts a three-month figure and a yearly figure on the same scale so you can compare them. It also blows up one odd month into a big-looking number, so treat a jumpy short window with care.
| MONTH | CPI | CORE CPI | CORE PCE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 2026 | 3.3 | 2.5 | 3.3 |
| Jun 2026 | 3.5 | 2.6 | 3.3 |
| May 2026 | 4.2 | 2.8 | 3.5 |
| Apr 2026 | 3.8 | 2.7 | 3.3 |
| Mar 2026 | 3.3 | 2.6 | 3.3 |
| Feb 2026 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| Jan 2026 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 3.1 |
| Dec 2025 | 2.7 | 2.6 | 3.0 |
| Nov 2025 | 2.7 | 2.6 | 2.8 |
| Oct 2025 | - | - | 2.8 |
| Sep 2025 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 2.8 |
| Aug 2025 | 2.9 | 3.1 | 2.9 |
| Jul 2025 | 2.7 | 3.1 | 2.9 |
| Jun 2025 | 2.7 | 2.9 | 2.8 |
| May 2025 | 2.4 | 2.8 | 2.8 |
| Apr 2025 | 2.3 | 2.8 | 2.6 |
| Mar 2025 | 2.4 | 2.8 | 2.7 |
| Feb 2025 | 2.8 | 3.1 | 3.0 |
| Jan 2025 | 3.0 | 3.3 | 2.8 |
| Dec 2024 | 2.9 | 3.2 | 3.0 |
| Nov 2024 | 2.7 | 3.3 | 3.0 |
| Oct 2024 | 2.6 | 3.3 | 3.0 |
| Sep 2024 | 2.4 | 3.3 | 2.8 |
| Aug 2024 | 2.6 | 3.3 | 2.9 |
This page shows the last ten years. The full history, every component, all four windows and the machine-readable feed come through the Helious API, and through MCP at api.helious.io/mcp if you want your own tools to read it directly.
Per-series pages with the next release date and the full print history: CPI, core CPI, PCE, core PCE, PPI. What it means for rates: the Treasury curve and the FOMC.
