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Consumer Price Index
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Recent and upcoming methodology changes: 2022
Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER) Unit Weight Refinement (posted September 2, 2022)
Beginning with January 2023 data, BLS plans to adjust the weighting method for Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER) in the CPI. The new method will use neighborhood level information on housing structure types to weight OER’s unit sample observations. BLS will continue to sample and weight housing units to be geographically representative. In some neighborhoods, detached houses are underrepresented in survey responses so additional unit weight will be given to underrepresented detached houses in the OER index sample. For more information on adjusting housing weights for structure types, see the research article “Location, Location, Structure Type: Rent Divergence within Neighborhoods.”
January 2023 CPI weight update (posted May 24, 2022)
Starting with January 2023 data, the BLS plans to update weights annually for the Consumer Price Index based on a single calendar year of data, using consumer expenditure data from 2021. This reflects a change from prior practice of updating weights biennially using two years of expenditure data.
Changes to new vehicles source data and methodology (posted January 13, 2022)
With the release of April 2022 data in May 2022, the CPI program plans to replace the data collected by the BLS for the new vehicles index with transaction data from J.D. Power. This index will continue to include prices for cars and trucks, but will no longer include motorcycle prices. Two special relative series that are currently published, new cars and new trucks, will also now be based on J.D. Power data. Publication of the combined new cars and trucks series will be discontinued at the same time. The full list of discontinued series is available online.
Seasonally adjusted indexes and calculated seasonal adjustment factors will continue to use BLS collected data, and will not take the new data source or methodology into account until the year 2023. Revised indexes and seasonal factors are available at Seasonal Adjustment in the CPI.
The Measuring Price Change in the CPI: Research new vehicle methodology factsheet is planned to be updated once this change takes effect. Research and the methodology leading to these changes are described in detail in a working paper: “A New Vehicles Transaction Price Index: Offsetting the Effects of Price Discrimination and Product Cycle Bias with a Year-Over-Year Index.”
For archived recent and upcoming methodology changes since 2017, see the recent and upcoming methodology change notice archive.
Last Modified Date: August 29, 2022