Loading data…
The Basket Index™ is designed to be transparent, reproducible, and rooted entirely in publicly available government data. This page documents every modeling choice.
All prices come from one of three US federal statistical programs.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — Average Price Data (APU) and Consumer Price Index (CPI) series, retrieved via the BLS public API (bls.gov/developers).
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) — series operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (fred.stlouisfed.org). Used primarily for housing and CPI indexes.
US Energy Information Administration (EIA) — weekly retail gasoline and diesel prices (eia.gov/opendata), aggregated to monthly averages.
Series IDs are reproducible — click through to see the same data on the source's site.
| Item | Source | Series ID | Unit | Base weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eggs (Grade A, Large) | BLS | APU0000708111 | dozen | 4% |
| Milk (Whole, Fortified) | BLS | APU0000709112 | gallon | 4% |
| Bread (White Loaf) | BLS | APU0000702111 | lb | 3% |
| Rice (White, Long-Grain) | BLS | APU0000701312 | lb | 2% |
| Bananas | BLS | APU0000711211 | lb | 2% |
| Chicken (Whole, Fresh) | BLS | APU0000706111 | lb | 4% |
| Ground Beef (100% Beef) | BLS | APU0000703112 | lb | 5% |
| Gasoline (Regular Unleaded) | EIA | PET.EMM_EPMR_PTE_NUS_DPG.W | gallon | 10% |
| Electricity (Residential) | BLS | APU000072610 | kWh | 8% |
| Rent of Primary Residence | FRED | CUUR0000SEHA | month | 30% |
For region R, household H, and month t:
BasketCost(R, H, t) = Σᵢ Price(i, R, t) × Quantity(i, H) BasketIndex(R, H, t) = 100 × BasketCost(R, H, t) / BasketCost(R, H, t₀)
Base period (t₀): January 2020. We chose January 2020 because it predates pandemic disruptions and aligns with how most major economic statistics communicate post-COVID inflation.
Forward-fill: When a monthly observation is missing, we carry the previous month's value forward up to three months. Beyond three months the item is excluded from the basket for that month rather than imputed.
Consumption baskets are calibrated to the USDA Thrifty / Low-Cost Food Plans and the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey shares.
We publish indexes for the United States, Texas, and the Dallas–Fort Worth metro. Where a regional series is not directly published (e.g. BLS APU for Texas-only eggs), we derive the regional figure from the national series using empirical multipliers calibrated to the most recently published regional snapshot. The architecture supports adding regions without code changes — just add a row to the Region table.
A daily cron job (/api/jobs/refresh, configured in vercel.json) pulls the latest observations, upserts them, recomputes every region/household index, and records the run in the RefreshLog table. If any source is unavailable the previous cached value is used and the failure is logged — the site never serves a blank chart.
Not a CPI replacement. The Basket Index covers a narrower set of essentials and weights them by household consumption rather than expenditure share. CPI remains the canonical inflation measure.
Quality and substitution. We do not adjust for product quality or consumer substitution. A household that switches from beef to chicken sees a smaller real impact than the Basket Index implies.
Lag. BLS APU prices are published monthly with a ~2 week lag. EIA gasoline is updated weekly. FRED housing series typically lag ~3 weeks.