Read now
Monthly Report
The interactive report. All 435 districts. No email.
The September 2026 report · all 50 states · all 435 congressional districts
The True Cost of Living
You are too busy working and living your life to calculate the true cost of living, so we did the math for you.
Inflation is reported as a percentage. Your bills arrive in dollars. The CPI is the government's official percentage. TrueCOLA publishes the dollars behind it: what it costs to live and how much income is left after the bills, for every congressional district, every month. The CPI report was built for economists. This report is built so anyone can see the true cost of living.
Our Mission
TrueCOLA is a 501(c)(3) public charity advancing economic literacy and empowering American households and policymakers through rigorous, data-driven analysis that reveals the true cost of living and bridges the gap between income and essential expenses.
Open the report
PDF edition
Designed for print
The designed report, for reading and printing.
Free download
AI Companion
A report file an AI assistant can read. No email needed.
The CPI-U is an index. Its change is a percent. We publish the dollars behind it: what living truly costs and what income is left.
BLS publishes two versions of the Consumer Price Index from the same prices. The CPI-U covers all urban consumers, over 90 percent of Americans: wage earners, salaried workers, the self-employed, the unemployed, and retirees in cities and smaller urban areas. The CPI-W covers the urban households that earn more than half of their income from clerical or wage jobs and had an earner working 37 weeks or more in the past year, approximately 30 percent. Federal law uses the CPI-W to adjust Social Security income each year.
Every CPI-W household is also a CPI-U household. The two are not separate groups. People in rural areas, on farms, in the armed forces, or in institutions are outside both populations.
What the government measures
Housing · Food · Transport · Medical · Other
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U Report
A national weighted average, stated as a rate. Official BLS figure: CPI-U up 3.7 percent over the 12 months to September 2026. This site does not invent that percent. The CPI-W rate applies to Social Security rows.
What a household like this has left
Housing · Food · Transport · Medical · Other
TrueCOLA Project Margin Report
The margin is net income minus the priced basket: -$1,974.66 for two adults, national, renter track, September 2026. Social Security rows use the CPI-W. District pages use the same arithmetic where you live.