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Monthly Report
The interactive report. All 435 districts. No email.
Open the reportThe July 2026 report · all 50 states · all 435 congressional districts
The RealCost of Living
Inflation is reported as a percentage. Your bills arrive in dollars. The CPI is the official percent. We publish the dollars behind it: what living truly costs and what income has left, for every congressional district, every month. Most people are not economists. This report is built so they can still read the cost of living.
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Companion is separateHow to read the two reports · July 2026
CPI-U is a weighted average, spoken as a percent. We publish the dollars behind it: what living truly costs and what income has left.
The CPI is an index. Under the index is a basket of goods and services: housing, food, transportation, medical care and everything else a household buys. The government prices that basket in dollars every month and weights it by what real households spend. It publishes the result as a percent. TrueCOLA prices the same basket in dollars, from the government's own figures, and subtracts the total from what a household takes home. That is the monthly margin. For two adults, national, renter track, it is -$1,950 this month. The margin is a modeled household's number, not your bank balance. Pick your district and household type to see the one built for where you live.
The five small dials are a diagram of that urban basket (Housing, Food, Transport, Medical, Other), not the official BLS table. The large percent dial is the language of the official index. The large dollar dial is the published July 2026 margin, -$1,950: red left of zero, green right of zero. This site does not invent the BLS rate. Why the two reports sit side by side
Net income, minus required costs.
Seven income groups drawn from federal data. For each, we subtract required monthly costs (housing, healthcare, and essential living costs) from net monthly income. What is left is the monthly margin.
Net income
$6,152
Margin
-$1,950
Where you live.
All 50 states, all 435 congressional districts, more than 26,000 ZIP codes. Select your district in the monthly report to see the margin computed where you live. Where rankings appear, they are produced by the same formula for all 435 districts, never by editorial selection.
All 435 districts, as one file your AI can read. Get the AI Companion.
Public JSON, no email: Public data
Sources documented.
Published figures are built from cited federal sources and one clearly labeled Zillow rent source, with 353 automated checks passed this month before publication. Corrections are recorded in a permanent public log. The basket is a market-price standard: current asking rent and unsubsidized benchmark premiums. It can run above what a settled household pays, and the methodology states this.
Two reports, two questions
The official CPI-U is a percent. We publish the dollars behind it: what living truly costs and what income has left.
The CPI-U reports how fast the price of the basket changed, as a rate. The Margin Report prices the same basket in dollars and sets it against income. One number says how much prices moved. The other says what the month costs and what is left. Same basket, two units: the government's percent, and the dollars underneath it.
What the government measures
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U Report
A national weighted average, spoken as a rate. Official BLS figure. This site does not invent that percent.
What a household like this has left
TrueCOLA Project Margin Report
The margin is net income minus the priced basket: -$1,950 for two adults, national, renter track, July 2026. District pages use the same arithmetic where you live.
Why this report exists
Every month, the federal government announces inflation as a percentage. It never tells a family what that means in dollars, for their income, where they live.
We take no position on what incomes or benefits should be. We take one position only: official cost-of-living measurement must reflect what households actually pay.
Known limitations
- The two-person senior and Social Security rows are constructed benchmarks under revision; corrected figures publish with a forthcoming report cycle and a corrections-log entry.
- The market-rent line is the one non-federal input, the Zillow Observed Rent Index, labeled wherever it appears. Each build pins the newest release available at build time, one month behind the report month.
- The basket is a market-price standard: current asking rent and unsubsidized benchmark premiums. It can run above what a settled household pays, and the methodology states this.
