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Prices are up in all U.S. metro areas, but some much more than others [1]

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Date: 2024-10-07

Along with its closely watched national inflation measure – the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) – the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks consumer prices by census region and in 23 major metropolitan areas around the country.

This Pew Research Center analysis focuses on how much more various goods and services cost now compared with early 2020, before pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, business closures and floods of federal relief cash disrupted normal economic patterns. And because inflation patterns can vary considerably from place to place, we used the BLS’s metro-area data for our analysis.

Comparing those metro areas can be tricky, because the BLS releases its data on different schedules. Overall inflation figures come out monthly for the three largest metro areas (New York-Newark-Jersey City, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin), in even-numbered months for 11 areas, and in odd-numbered months for nine areas. Data on specific items may come out monthly or bimonthly, depending on the item and metro area.

For each item in each area, we compared the most recent price index value (typically July or August 2024, depending on the data release schedule for that area) with the first index value available for early 2020 (typically January or February). In a few cases where those values weren’t available, we used index data from May or June 2024 and December 2019; if those weren’t available either, we excluded that item-metro combination from the analysis. For simplicity’s sake, this post uses “price increases” or similar terms to refer to changes in the index values reported by the BLS, though those index values are not themselves prices and can’t be directly compared across metro areas.

In deciding which goods and services to include, we tried to balance specificity (the more specific the better) with availability (too much missing data would make meaningful analyses impossible). In the end, 20 CPI-U items made the cut.

Most of those CPI-U items are fairly self-explanatory, but one deserves a bit more detail. “Owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence” is the BLS’ attempt to separate a house’s value as shelter (which the CPI-U considers a service) from its value as an investment (the increase in its market value over time), since investments aren’t included in the CPI-U. It’s effectively an estimate of how much it would cost to rent out an owner-occupied home.

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[1] Url: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/07/prices-are-up-in-all-us-metro-areas-but-some-much-more-than-others/

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