A weighted average of what families actually paid for the goods and services that make up household life — compared directly to the official CPI using identical weights but real retail prices.
Apples to apples, not weights to weights. The Reality Index uses the same household-spending weights BLS uses for the CPI. The only difference is the prices feeding the buckets: independent retail and consumer data wherever it exists (Kaiser for health premiums, NCES for tuition, FHFA for home prices, EIA for gasoline, BLS Average Price Data for food and electricity), BLS subindexes only where it doesn’t.
The cumulative gap since 1980
Headline under different weighting choices — annual series, 1980→2025
Reality Index 1980 → 2025
—
—
Official CPI 1980 → 2025
—
—
Reality Index ran
—
faster than CPI over 45 years
Biggest single-year gap
—
—
—
—
Reality Index vs. CPI, 1970–2025
index, 1980 = 100 · annual series · —
Reality Index (selected weighting) Official CPI-U
Weighting used — —
Share of the basket assigned to each category under the selected weighting.
How to read this. The monthly hero at top is the live latest-month reading from the monthly engine (CES-2024 weighting). The toggle controls the annual series: the same real prices re-aggregated under different household-spending weights. Changing the weighting changes how much each price movement counts — it does not change the underlying prices. The default (1980 fixed basket) holds 1980 spending shares constant \u2014 the strictest \u201csame basket over time\u201d measure.