The data
Where the numbers come from
Everything we publish runs on live, authoritative, free public data. This page lists every source we use, the licence it carries, and how to get at the raw numbers yourself - because checking us should be easy.
When a source publishes new figures, our pages update with them, so what you're reading is as current as the data itself. Every chart names its source and the date its figures run to, and the further reading under each story links straight to the relevant dataset.
US Energy Information Administration (EIA)
The statistical agency of the US Department of Energy. We use its weekly retail fuel survey (gasoline and diesel prices, every Monday, since the early 1990s) and its monthly electricity data (residential rates for all fifty states).
Licence: US government work - public domain. You can
use it for anything, as we do, with a credit as good practice.
Get it yourself: the
EIA Open Data portal offers
the full API free with a registration key, and every series we chart
can be browsed and downloaded on eia.gov without one.
FRED - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
FRED collects hundreds of thousands of economic series in one place. We use the US consumer price index (CPI-U, all items, seasonally adjusted) for the inflation story and every "in today's money" calculation.
Licence: free to use with attribution; the underlying
index is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This product
uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Get it yourself: every series is browsable and
downloadable at fred.stlouisfed.org,
and the FRED API
is free with a registration key.
Download the data yourself
Every series behind our charts is downloadable as clean JSON - the exact numbers the pages are drawn from, with the source, licence and fetch date inside the file. Take them:
- US regular gasoline, average retail price, weekly
- US No 2 diesel, average retail price, weekly
- Diesel's premium over regular gasoline, weekly
- US residential electricity, average price, monthly
- US residential electricity prices by state, latest month
- US consumer prices (CPI-U), monthly index
- US inflation, year on year, monthly
- US yield curve: 10-year minus 2-year Treasury rate, weekly
- US yield curve: 10-year minus 2-year Treasury rate, daily
- Bitcoin price in US dollars (Coinbase), weekly
- Bitcoin price in US dollars (Coinbase), daily, last five years
- Broad US dollar index, weekly (Jan 2006 = 100)
- Broad US dollar index, daily (Jan 2006 = 100), last five years
- US trade balance in goods and services, monthly
- US federal debt, total public debt, quarterly
- US federal debt, total public debt outstanding, daily
- US federal debt as a share of GDP, quarterly
- Most-demanded skills across live job listings
- The Sahm rule recession indicator, monthly, since 1959
- New claims for unemployment benefits, weekly, since 1967
- US consumer prices: rent of primary residence, monthly index
- US rent inflation, year on year, monthly
- US rental vacancy rate, quarterly, since 1956
- Median gross rent in the US, annual (ACS)
- Median gross rent by metro area, latest ACS (all metros)
- 30-year fixed mortgage rate, weekly average, since 1971
- 15-year fixed mortgage rate, weekly average, since 1991
- The mortgage spread: 30-year rate minus the 10-year Treasury, weekly
- Cocoa, world market price, monthly (Pink Sheet)
- Arabica coffee, world market price, monthly (Pink Sheet)
- AI exposure by occupation (Anthropic Economic Index)
How we handle the data
We take each source's published series as-is - no smoothing, no adjustments we don't declare on the page. Anything we derive (a gap between two series, a ranking, a percentage change) is calculated from the published figures, and the working is stated wherever the number appears. When a source revises its data, our next update reflects the revision.
If you spot a figure that doesn't match its source, tell Richard - being checkable is the point of the site.