Many different expenses serve as components of the CPI. As a result, the market basket that is used to calculate this key economic indicator consists of a wide range of costs that consumers incur ...

The Consumer Price Index “is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services,” according to the Bureau of ...

The Social Security Administration specifically uses the CPI-W, a subset that reflects the purchasing habits of urban wage earners and clerical workers. To calculate the COLA, the Social Security ...

While inflation has cooled since 2022, the CPI rose 2.9% from Dec. 2023 to Dec. 2024. Not all prices rise at the same rate – some sectors of the economy are seeing minimal inflation or even ...

To calculate the COLA, the Social Security Administration averages the monthly CPI-W readings from the third quarter, which spans from July through September. This average is then compared to the ...

CPI-W is used primarily to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for federal benefits and to index income tax brackets for inflation. The CPI-U is based on a scientifically selected random sample ...

Conversely, the PPI includes export prices while the CPI does not. The BLS produces more than 10,000 product and industry price indexes each month, which it then uses to calculate the PPI.