CPI-U all items — the Bureau of Labor Statistics flat file

Source. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, all items, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted. Series CUUR0000SA0. Type. Primary source — the publishing agency’s own machine-readable series. Location. https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/cu/cu.data.1.AllItems, about 2.7 MB.

What it contains. Every observation of every all-items CPI series the Bureau publishes, as one tab-separated file: series identifier, year, period (M01–M12, plus S01/S02 semi-annual and M13 annual), value, and footnote codes. Monthly coverage of CUUR0000SA0 begins in 1913, which is 62 years short of this corpus’s 1851 starting point but covers every year for which Ohio per-pupil figures exist.

Why it matters here. A repository spanning 1851 to the present cannot compare any two nominal figures without it, and Ohio’s central mechanism — H.B. 920 holding levy yields nominally flat — is only visible as a decline once a series is deflated. In nominal terms it looks like stability.

What it corrected. crates/deflator carried a hand-transcribed CPI-U June series in which twenty-one of twenty-three points had never been checked against the agency. Comparing them to this file confirmed twenty-two and found one wrong: FY2016 was transcribed as 241.038, and the published value is 241.018. The whole series is now marked verified and crates/connect/tests/deflator_matches_bls.rs re-checks it on every test run.

Access constraints. Free, no registration, no API key. But the Bureau rejects any request whose User-Agent does not carry a contact address, with a bare 403 and no explanation — a browser-like agent string is refused as well. Set EDFUND_CONTACT to an email address before fetching; crates/connect builds the agent string from it and says so when a fetch 403s.

Caveats:

• Period matters as much as series. M06 is June; M13 is the annual average and S01 is the first-half average. Reading the wrong period gives a plausible number that is not the one the deflator’s fiscal-year alignment assumes.
• Neighboring series names are close enough to confuse. CUUS0000SA0 is the semi-annual companion and CUUR0000SAF1 is food. Both would deflate quietly and wrongly.
• CPI-U is a general consumer index. School costs are majority compensation, for which the Employment Cost Index is the better deflator with much shorter coverage. Any figure produced with this must name the index used — see the note in crates/deflator.
• Fiscal-year alignment is a choice. This corpus takes the June observation as the point value for a fiscal year ending 30 June. A July-to-June average is the defensible alternative and would move long-series growth figures slightly.

A committed extract of the June observations is at crates/connect/fixtures/cpi-u-june.tsv, which is what makes the deflator’s verification runnable without a network.

Feeds connector #

bls-cpi, implemented in crates/connect/src/cpi.rs.