About & sources

How the numbers work

Prices are U.S. city averages as published. Grocery and energy prices come from the BLS Average Price Data program, which records actual dollar prices for specific items each month. Other categories (rent, used cars, medical care, tuition) have no single "price", so they are shown as Consumer Price Index components.

Today's dollars = price × (CPI now ÷ CPI then), using CPI-U for all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted. We use the unadjusted index because it is never revised, so a published figure here won't quietly change.

Hours of work = price ÷ average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (BLS), before taxes. We use this wage series because it goes back to 1964; the all-employee series only begins in 2006.

Relative to inflation (for CPI categories) = the category's index ÷ the overall CPI, set to 100 at the start of the period. Above 100 means it rose faster than prices in general.

Event comparisons measure from the month before the event, because a shock in the middle of a month already moves that month's average.

How it stays current

An automated job checks each agency every day and publishes within a day of a new release. Before anything goes live, every new number is checked: an impossible value, a missing series, an implausibly large jump or a large revision to past data stops the update until a person has checked it against the agency's own release. Agencies revise recent data; every revision is logged.

Gaps are real: for example, some BLS series were not collected during the fall-2025 federal government shutdown. Those months are left blank rather than filled in.

Sources and licences

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We only use public-domain or openly licensed data. Copyrighted series (for example S&P/Case-Shiller home prices or stock indexes) are excluded even when available through FRED.

Disclaimer

Albatross Atlas is for education and general information. It is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Figures are national averages and may differ from prices where you live. We work to keep the data accurate but make no guarantee; check the original source before relying on a number. Event summaries are our own and simplified. Any link between an event and a price change is shown for context, not as proof of cause.

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Using our charts and data

You're welcome to cite or link to Albatross Atlas. Please credit "Albatross Atlas" and the original agency shown under each chart.