CPI by city: inflation in each of the 23 metro areas

The 23 areas, at their latest month

Each row is one BLS series, CPI-U all items, not seasonally adjusted. The month differs from row to row because of the publication rhythm: a metro priced in even months shows August while the national index already shows September.

The regions and the two size classes complete the picture for places outside these 23 areas: the Northeast, Midwest, South and West are published every month, and so are Size Class A (areas above 2.5 million people) and Size Class B/C (the smaller ones).

Why only 23 cities

The CPI is a national survey. Prices are collected in 75 urban areas chosen to represent the whole urban population, and most of them stand for other places of the same region and size, not for themselves. Since the 2018 area revision, 21 areas with more than 2.5 million people are large enough to represent only themselves; together with Urban Alaska and Urban Hawaii they make the 23 areas with a published index. A city of 500,000 people may well be in the sample, but its prices are folded into the regional and size-class indexes and never published on their own.

If your city is not in the list, the BLS suggests the region it belongs to, or the size class that matches it. The page on why city inflation differs explains what drives the gaps between areas.

Compare two areas over the same years

The calculator at the top takes two areas and a starting year, uses the annual average of that year for both, and carries the amount to the latest month each area has published. Since the 2019 average, the cumulative rise ranges from 23.4 % in Houston to 38.4 % in Tampa. That gap is real price change, not noise, but it comes with a warning from the BLS: each local index has a much smaller sample than the national one and is subject to substantially more sampling error.

Which index belongs in a contract

For a lease, a wage agreement or a support order indexed to inflation, the BLS gives two pieces of advice. Use an index that is not seasonally adjusted, because seasonally adjusted figures are revised for up to five years. And prefer the national or the regional index to a local one, because local indexes are more volatile. A clause that names the Urban Hawaii CPI is legal and common, but the parties should know that a 12-month figure for a metro can move by a point or more from one release to the next for reasons that have to do with the sample, not with prices.

A clause also has to say which month it reads. For the 20 bimonthly metros the choice matters: a clause that reads "the CPI for September" can never be applied to an even-month area, and a clause that reads "the most recent index" will pick a different month depending on the area. The calculator always names the month it used.

October 2025 in the city indexes

No area has an index for October 2025. During the lapse in appropriations the BLS collected no prices, and the dash with footnote X appears in every table. The effect on a metro depends on its rhythm. The 3 monthly areas lost one month among twelve. The 11 even-month areas lost one of their six months, and their December 2025 index had no two-month change to report. The 9 odd-month areas lost nothing, since October is not one of their months. The October 2025 page explains every consequence, including the missing 12-month change for October 2026.

What a city index cannot do

Every local index has a base period, 1982-84 = 100 for most of them, December 2001=100 for Phoenix, December 2017=100 for Riverside. An index of 400 in one city and 300 in another only says that prices rose more since the base period in the first. The BLS is explicit: an area index does not show whether prices or living costs are higher or lower there than in another area. To decide whether a job offer in another city pays enough, a CPI tells you how fast prices moved, not where they stand.