Methodology
How the Grocery Basket Price Index is built
The Basket Report Grocery Basket Price Index is the total cost of a fixed basket of 24 staple grocery items at their actual U.S. average shelf price, reported monthly. Every number traces to a named U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics series. No price is estimated, interpolated, or smoothed.
The index
Basket Report tracks 36 grocery and household price series, including a fixed 24-item Basket Index. The other twelve series are published as reference prices and have no weight in the basket calculation.
For a given area and month, the basket value is the sum over items of quantity × price:
basket(area, month) = Σ (quantityi × pricei)
Quantities are fixed across time and areas, so a change in the index reflects price movement, not a change in what's in the basket (a Laspeyres-style fixed-weight index). Quantities are set once and never changed silently — any change is a versioned event on the corrections page. The latest national value is $111.17 (June 2026).
Missing values
If BLS does not publish an item for a target month, the item’s own series remains null for that month. For the fixed 24-item headline basket and every fixed seasonal index, we carry forward that item’s most recent published BLS price without altering it. Every affected derived-basket figure names the item and original observation month — for example, “Pork chops: May 2026 price carried forward because June was not published.”
This keeps each derived basket’s composition fixed instead of silently dropping an item. Public national and seasonal-index CSV/JSON downloads include the direct-published count, carry-forward count, item slug, BLS series ID, carried value, source month, and target month. Month-over-month and year-over-year changes compare the same fixed components. Regional comparisons keep their separate latest-available comparable-basket method because regional BLS series publish on staggered cadences.
Real vs. nominal
Every series ships both nominal (the dollar price as reported) and real (CPI-deflated to the latest month's dollars, using CPI-U all-items). The real series strips out general inflation so you can see whether an item got more expensive relative to everything else.
Geography: national + regions
The BLS label “U.S. city average” means a national statistical average across urban price-collection areas — not one literal city, store, or guaranteed shelf price. Local prices can differ. BLS also publishes grocery average prices for the four census regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), but not individual metros. To compare regions fairly (each reports a different subset of items), we rank them on a comparable 11-item basket of staples priced across all four regions, each at its latest available price: Bread, Ground beef, Chicken, Chicken breast, Bacon, Ham, Potatoes, Bananas, Oranges, Lemons, Potato chips.
The basket — every item and series
| Item | Qty | Unit | BLS series |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bacon, sliced | 1 | pound | APU0000704111 |
| Bananas | 3 | pound | APU0000711211 |
| Bread, white, pan | 2 | pound | APU0000702111 |
| Butter, salted, grade AA | 1 | pound | APU0000FS1101 |
| Cheddar cheese, natural | 1 | pound | APU0000710212 |
| Chicken breast, boneless | 1 | pound | APU0000FF1101 |
| Chicken, fresh, whole | 2 | pound | APU0000706111 |
| Coffee, 100%, ground roast | 1 | pound | APU0000717311 |
| Eggs, grade A, large | 2 | dozen | APU0000708111 |
| Flour, white, all purpose | 2 | pound | APU0000701111 |
| Ground beef, 100% beef | 2 | pound | APU0000703112 |
| Ham, boneless, excluding canned | 1 | pound | APU0000704312 |
| Lemons | 2 | pound | APU0000711412 |
| Lettuce, iceberg | 1 | pound | APU0000712211 |
| Milk, whole, fortified | 2 | gallon | APU0000709112 |
| Orange juice, frozen concentrate | 1 | 16 ounces | APU0000713111 |
| Oranges, navel | 2 | pound | APU0000711311 |
| Pork chops, center cut, bone-in | 1 | pound | APU0000704211 |
| Potato chips | 1 | 16 ounces | APU0000718311 |
| Potatoes, white | 3 | pound | APU0000712112 |
| Rice, white, long grain, uncooked | 2 | pound | APU0000701312 |
| Spaghetti & macaroni | 1 | pound | APU0000701322 |
| Sugar, white, all sizes | 2 | pound | APU0000715211 |
| Tomatoes, field grown | 2 | pound | APU0000712311 |
Also tracked (not in the index): we publish price pages for a few additional staples — Beer, Wine, Steak, Ice Cream, Yogurt, Strawberries, Chicken Legs, Soda, Beef Roast, Romaine Lettuce, Chocolate Chip Cookies, American Cheese — but they are not part of the fixed 24-item Grocery Basket Price Index and carry no weight in it. They appear in the A–Z directory (without the basket marker) for reference only, so the headline index stays a stable, like-for-like figure.
Source & freshness
Data is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI Average Price Data, retrieved via the BLS Public Data API. The visible "data through" date equals the latest observation in the data, asserted at build — if the pipeline doesn't advance, the build fails rather than ship a stale page. Latest data: June 2026, retrieved August 1, 2026.
BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov.
BLS data is a work of the U.S. government and in the public domain. Our charts and downloads are free to cite and embed — see any data page for CSV/JSON and embed code. Changes to this methodology are logged on corrections.