The OpenBrand CPI is designed to complement the BLS data.

The OpenBrand Consumer Price Index focuses specifically on durable consumer goods, providing detailed insight into pricing trends for categories such as appliances, consumer electronics, and home improvement products.

Unlike the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index, which tracks a broad basket of consumer goods and services across the economy, the OpenBrand CPI uses a much larger product-level dataset focused on retail durable goods.

OpenBrand’s dataset includes pricing, promotion, and availability data for more than 1.4 million individual products, which is more than ten times the product coverage used in the BLS CPI. This expanded dataset enables more granular, timely, and category-specific analysis of price changes in the durable goods market.

The OpenBrand CPI is built using OpenBrand’s proprietary market and competitive intelligence data, which covers pricing, promotions, and product availability across more than 1.4 million individual durable goods products sold through major retailers. Data collection includes:

• Real-Time Price Tracking: Prices are sourced daily from online marketplaces, retail websites, and brick-and-mortar store listings.
• Retailer & Manufacturer Data: Aggregates pricing information from major retailers, direct-to-consumer brands, and wholesale suppliers into broader consumer categories.
• Temporal Coverage: Captures price variations over time, including daily discounts and price promotions

This large dataset allows OpenBrand to analyze pricing trends at a high level across categories or at the SKU level, providing detailed insight into how prices change across the retail marketplace.

The OpenBrand CPI report is released monthly and provides a summary of price changes, promotional activity, and category-level pricing trends across durable goods.

The OpenBrand CPI NowCast is updated twice a month between the full monthly read, delivering a more real-time read on inflation ahead of the monthly cast.

For organizations that require more frequent insights, OpenBrand also provides weekly CPI reporting and monthly CPI forecasts through its subscription platform. These datasets include near real-time SKU-level pricing information that can be downloaded in bulk for deeper analysis.

The OpenBrand CPI covers over 1.4 million products across the appliances, communications, home improvement, and recreation categories. For a full list of products, read the OpenBrand CPI methodology document.

OpenBrand CPI headline figures report a seasonally adjusted basis to provide a clearer view of underlying inflation trends across consumer durables and personal goods.

Many product categories exhibit predictable seasonal pricing patterns—such as holiday promotions, new product launches, and post-holiday price normalization. While these seasonal movements are important, they can sometimes obscure the underlying month-to-month inflation signal.

We address this by implementing seasonal adjustment using the industry-standard X-13ARIMA-SEATS methodology, the same statistical approach widely used by official statistical agencies and central banks around the world.

This allows us to:

• Clarify underlying price trends by removing predictable seasonal effects
• Improve month-to-month comparability in the headline figures
• Align OpenBrand CPI methodology with widely accepted economic standards

Importantly, the non-seasonally adjusted data will continue to be available, allowing analysts to study the full seasonal dynamics of pricing when needed.

As always, our goal is to make the OpenBrand CPI as transparent, rigorous, and useful as possible for manufacturers, retailers, and economists tracking real-time pricing trends in the consumer goods economy.

Beginning March 2026, personal care products will no longer be included in the OpenBrand Consumer Price Index (CPI). February represented the final month in which personal care categories are incorporated into the headline index.

This methodological update reflects a strategic refinement of the OpenBrand CPI’s core objective: to measure price and discount trends exclusively within the consumer durable goods sector. While personal care products provided valuable insight into broader retail pricing dynamics, their pricing behavior and promotional cycles differ meaningfully from those of durable goods. Removing these categories will enhance the precision and interpretability of the index as a focused measure of durable goods inflation and discounting activity.

To preserve historical continuity and analytical comparability, all future releases of the OpenBrand CPI and the OpenBrand CPI NowCast will include back-calculated index values with personal care products removed. This revised historical series will allow users to evaluate long-term trends on a consistent methodological basis and ensure that month-over-month and year-over-year comparisons remain accurate.

This refinement strengthens the OpenBrand CPI’s role as a high-frequency, data-driven indicator of pricing power, discount intensity, and inflation trends across consumer durable goods. We believe this update will improve clarity for policymakers, industry stakeholders, investors, and media users who rely on the index for timely insight into the durable goods marketplace.