PCE Inflation Contributions from Goods and Services provides monthly updates on price changes for the broad categories of goods and services that U.S. households consume, as measured by personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation. This tool is intended to track the extent to which those categories of price changes drive changes in overall inflation.
The data on this page are based on detailed monthly breakdowns by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of how much U.S. consumers spend on a wide range of goods—such as food and gasoline—and services—such as rents and health care—and how much they pay for each of these categories. The detailed breakdowns are used to calculate how much of the price changes observed in the overall economy is attributable to these specific spending categories.
Price changes in two important categories, food and energy, are quite volatile and are typically more sensitive to global demand and supply shocks. Because of this, the charts on this page separate their contributions to headline inflation from other goods and services. The remaining inflation categories, referred to as core inflation, represent price changes of goods such as cars, furniture, and clothing, as well as price changes of non-energy services, such as transportation, education, and hospitality services. Within non-energy services, shelter inflation, which measures changes in rents, is thought to be less tied to the labor market than other services and therefore is represented as a separate category.
Figure 1 shows the contributions to the 12-month change in overall PCE inflation from four categories: housing, core services excluding housing, core goods, and food and energy. Figure 2 shows how much the same categories contribute to monthly headline inflation.
Figures 3 and 4 focus on core inflation, removing the volatile food and energy categories. Figure 3 shows the contributions of core goods and services to the 12-month change in core inflation. Figure 4 provides more details on the components of core services excluding housing—often called supercore—which has historically been the largest contributor to inflation in the United States. The figure breaks inflation in this category into contributions from price changes in five groups: health care, financial services and insurance, food services and accommodations, transportation services, and other services.
Historical data for these inflation contribution breakdowns going back to 1960 are also available in a downloadable data file below.
Note: PCE data are released monthly as part of the Personal Income and Outlays Release of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Summary statistics on this page will be updated monthly soon after the release of the data.
References
Abdelrahman, Hamza, and Adam H. Shapiro, and Aren S. Yalcin. 2024. “What’s Driving Inflation? Our New Data Page Gives a Detailed Look.” SF Fed Blog, March 7.
Leduc, Sylvain, Daniel J. Wilson, and Cindy Zhao. 2023. “Will a Cooler Labor Market Slow Supercore Inflation?” FRBSF Economic Letter 2023-18 (July 12).
Leduc, Sylvain. 2023. “Quick Clip: Mix of Inflation Contributors Is Changing.” YouTube video excerpt from “Ask the SF Fed,” February 7.
Download Data
PCE Inflation Contributions data (Excel file, 24 kb)
For related data see Supply- and Demand-Driven PCE Inflation and Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation