THE U.S. PRICE PICTURE
Everyday prices. A longer view.
Forty years of prices, plus the national debt.
Published data. A little more perspective.
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Interactive observations. Focus a chart and use the left and right arrow keys to move one observation, Page Up or Page Down to move twelve observations, Home for the first, and End for the latest. Escape dismisses the tooltip. A full data table is available in Source and details below each chart.
READING THE NUMBERS
Slower inflation doesn’t mean lower prices.
Inflation measures the pace of price change. Fuel charts show a price per gallon; groceries track an unchanged, illustrative basket. National debt is a separate measure of the government’s outstanding borrowing.
Sources, definitions & the fine print
Published observations, not live quotes
Each chart ends at its own latest available observation. Monthly dates refer to the month measured; weekly and daily dates are the source’s observation dates. Retrieval time is separate. New economic observations follow the agencies’ release schedules, not this site’s refresh schedule.
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Freshness checks flag monthly observations older than 75 days, weekly observations older than 21 days, and daily debt observations older than 7 days. A source-reported problem is flagged even when its observation date is recent. A warning is not a substitute for checking the source.
Five measures. Different meanings.
- Inflation: twelve-month percent change in the all-items, not-seasonally-adjusted CPI-U. A move from 3% to 2% is −1 percentage point, not a 1% price decline.
- Gasoline & diesel: national retail averages, including taxes, in dollars per U.S. gallon. Regular gasoline includes all formulations; diesel is on-highway. Your local station can differ.
- Groceries: CPI-U food at home, not restaurant meals. Basket = $100 × current index ÷ baseline index. Buying power = $100 × baseline index ÷ current index. The fixed ten-year baseline does not move when you switch chart range. This is a price-index illustration, not an average household bill or an actual store quote.
- National debt: Treasury’s total public debt outstanding: debt held by the public plus intragovernmental holdings. One trillion dollars = $1,000,000,000,000. This is a stock of debt, not the annual budget deficit, and is not adjusted for inflation or GDP.
Comparisons without moving the goalposts
Ranges are calendar years counted back from each series’ latest observation, not today. Historical comparisons use the last real observation on or before the calendar anniversary: the same month for CPI, or within seven days for weekly and daily series. Both exact dates appear in each chart’s details. If no match exists, the comparison is unavailable.
No missing values are replaced with zero. Lines break across missing monthly or weekly releases and extended daily gaps; scheduled weekends and short holiday gaps in Treasury data are not missing releases. Fuel axes begin at zero. Grocery and debt charts are scaled to their actual ten-year range so long-term change remains visible; exact dollar values stay in the labels and tooltips. Inflation’s axis includes zero and accommodates negative rates.
The CSV contains raw source values and units, exact dates, source links, retrieval metadata, and separately labeled grocery illustrations. It follows the selected chart range. The JSON contains the full published dataset.