Grocery Affordability Gap

The grocery affordability gap subtracts the yearly change in the Bureau of Labor Statistics food price index from the yearly change in average hourly earnings on private-sector payrolls. Over the 12 months to August 2026, earnings growth ran 0.5 percentage points ahead of food price growth. The gap is about the same as the 0.8 percentage points of August 2025. A month earlier, in July 2026, it was about the same, at 0.3 percentage points.

A reading above zero means the hourly earnings average grew faster than food prices. The gap is measured in percentage points: it is the difference between two growth rates, not a percent of anyone's pay and not a dollar amount. It compares pay with food prices only, so it does not show whether wages kept up with prices in general.

Despite the name, the price side is the full CPI food index: groceries plus restaurant meals. The BLS food-at-home index, the grocery-only measure, can run at a different rate. The earnings side is total private payroll divided by total hours, so it moves when the mix of higher- and lower-paid jobs changes, not only when pay rates change; it is not the typical worker's raise. Food CPI shows the food price rate on its own, and Grocery Prices Cumulative Change Since Jan 2020 tracks the total change in food prices since January 2020.

BLS publishes both inputs but not this gap; American Default Research computes it from the seasonally adjusted series. The two newest months of earnings are preliminary and BLS revises them twice, and first prints of the yearly earnings change have later been revised by as much as 0.43 point, so we call a move smaller than that about the same. There is no figure for October 2025, when the federal government shutdown stopped price collection, and BLS says the missing data affected November 2025 food prices. The gap is national only.