CPI Inflation Rate (All Items)

The all-items consumer price index follows what people in U.S. cities and suburbs pay for a broad basket of goods and services, from rent and groceries to gasoline and car repairs. Over the 12 months to August 2026, the price of that basket went up 3.4%. The yearly rate is up from 2.9% in August 2025. It edged up from 3.3% in July 2026, too small a move to call a turn.

A rate above zero means the basket still costs more than it did a year earlier, whether the rate is speeding up or slowing down.

The all-items rate sums up the whole basket, and its parts can pull in different directions in the same month. Food CPI, Shelter CPI and Energy CPI show three of them. This is not core inflation, which is a separate BLS index that leaves out food and energy. It is also not the measure behind the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System's inflation goal, which the Fed sets for the PCE price index from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

We compute the yearly change from the seasonally adjusted index, meaning BLS has removed the usual calendar swings, so our figure can differ by a tenth of a point from the 12-month figure BLS headlines, which uses the unadjusted index. There is no figure for October 2025, when the federal government shutdown stopped data collection. BLS carried some prices and rents forward for that month, so it says the readings from November 2025 through March 2026 were affected. The index covers urban consumers, over 90 percent of the U.S. population, and leaves out rural areas outside metro areas.