For organizations

Using Basket Index data

Basket Index is a free public measure of what everyday household essentials cost, how that is changing, and how it differs by state — built entirely on published US federal data. If you want to quote it, chart it, build on it, or support it, this page tells you exactly what exists today and what does not.

Available to buy

$149 one-time

Local Cost Brief

A dated, sourced cost brief for one state or metro and one household profile — headline cost, five-year trend, movers, comparisons, income context, and a provenance table giving the agency, series ID and verify link for every figure.

Built from the data already published free on this site. You are paying for the assembly and the citations, not for access — there is no premium dataset behind it, and there will not be one.

$149 for one geography, +$99 for each additional place compared on the same order.

See what is in it Read a complete sample

Available today, free, no sign-up

Everything in this list is live right now.

Dated monthly releases — a permanent, citable snapshot for every month since January 2021, each with the period, geography and household it describes.
An open JSON API — every tracked item and the Basket Index series, no key required.
CSV downloads for each published report.
Chart embeds — a self-contained, JavaScript-free iframe for any tracked item, offered from the “Embed this chart” control on an item page.
Full methodology and a per-series data status page, so any figure can be traced to its source series.

Tell us what you are trying to do

There is no form and no CRM behind this — these are plain email links with a subject line, so we can see which kinds of use come up and how often. A sentence is enough.

Newsrooms and publishers

Citing a figure, embedding a chart, or wanting a cut we do not publish.

Quoting the index with attribution is welcome and always free. If you need a specific state, household or period that is not on the site, ask — that is useful signal about what to publish next.

Email us about media use →

Researchers and analysts

Bulk data, longer history, reproducibility.

The API and CSVs cover what is on the site. If you need the full history in one file, a different household basket, or a stable versioned snapshot for a paper, tell us which — none of those exist yet and we would build the ones people actually ask for.

Email us about data access →

Businesses and planning teams

Geographic cost differences for real decisions.

Basket Index measures the cost of household essentials by state. It is not a wage or compensation benchmark, and we will say so rather than let it be used as one. If a cost-of-living question is blocking a decision, describe it and we will tell you honestly whether this data can answer it.

Email us about business use →

Sponsorship and partnership

Supporting the work, with a hard boundary.

Nothing is sponsored today and there is no rate card. If we ever accept support, it will be disclosed in plain sight on the thing it supports, and it will never influence a number, a methodology choice, or which movers we report. A sponsor who wants a say in the findings is not a sponsor we want.

Email us about sponsorship →

Not built — so you do not have to ask

No paid API tiers, no API keys, no billing. The rate-limit table on /developers describes a shape we may grow into, not a price list. The only thing that can be bought is the Local Cost Brief above, and that is a document — buying one grants no special data access, and every figure in it is free to look up here.
No enforced rate limits. The X-RateLimit-Limit header is advisory. Please be considerate; responses are cached for an hour.
No SLA, no versioning guarantee, no changelog. The API shape is stable in practice but not contractually.
No bulk export. Per-item and per-series endpoints only.
No wage, salary or compensation data, and no plans for any.

Attribution

The underlying data is in the public domain — it comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve, the US Energy Information Administration, the Census Bureau and HUD. What Basket Index adds is the ingest, the regional derivation and the index formula.

When you use a figure, name the geography and the household it describes, and link back. For example: “Basket Index™, August 2026 — US, family of four”, linking to https://basketindex.org/why-prices-rising.

Terms currently describe the derived index as licensed for non-commercial use during preview. If you are a commercial publisher and want to use it, say so — we would rather grant permission than have the terms quietly stop useful work. Read the current terms.

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