Reality Index · The composite view

What families actually pay versus what CPI says they pay.

Every item in the Reality Index, on one chart, indexed to 100 in each item's earliest year of available data and compared to CPI All Items over the same period. The lines that rise faster than the dashed baseline are the categories where CPI understates what families experience.

Reading the chart. Each colored line is one item from the Reality Index basket. Each is rebased to 100 in its first year of available data, which lets us compare growth rates across items that have different starting years. The dashed blue line is CPI All Items, rebased to the same starting year as each visible item. Where an item's line ends above the blue dashed line, it grew faster than overall CPI. Where it ends below, slower.

Use the tabs to filter by category. The default All view shows every item; the bucket tabs isolate just food, energy, housing, health care, or services so you can see each category's pattern without visual noise.

Reality Index — all items vs CPI All Items

Each line indexed to 100 at its earliest available year · CPI baseline rebased to match each item's start

Why this matters. No single item in the Reality Index reproduces CPI exactly. Some items (chicken, bananas, coffee, flour) ran slower than CPI for decades — these are categories where global supply chains, manufacturing efficiency, and stable agricultural input costs kept retail prices in check. Other items (housing, health care, ground beef, eggs) ran significantly faster than CPI — these are the categories where families feel the squeeze. The composite view lets you see the spread without committing to a weighting scheme. A weighted composite, using either BLS Consumer Expenditure weights or alternative credit-card-transaction data, is on the v1.5 roadmap.