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About the FRED Blog

These brief articles use data and graphing features in FRED®, our free data service. They illustrate timely economic concepts and best practices for using data. Views expressed are not necesarily those of the St. Louis Fed or Federal Reserve System.

The takeaway

Median PCE inflation data from the Cleveland Fed help track the underlying trend in consumer prices.

What is median PCE inflation?

FRED recently added median PCE inflation data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which help track the underlying trend in consumer prices: The Cleveland Fed takes the price changes for all the individual spending categories in the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, ranks them from smallest to largest, and picks the one in the middle. That middle value is median PCE inflation.

Our FRED graph above shows the value of the year-over-year median PCE inflation (solid blue line) and the month-over-month median PCE inflation (solid green line) between February 1970 and September 2026, the latest data available at the time of this writing.

Headline vs. trend inflation

Headline inflation can jump around from month to month. For example, a spike in gasoline prices or a dip in airfares can move the overall inflation number even when most prices are rising at a steady pace. Median PCE inflation is built to look past these swings: The median is not impacted by what happens at the extremes of price swings, only by broad changes in the distribution of price changes.

More inflation trend data in FRED

The trimmed mean inflation measure is a close cousin of the median inflation measure. A trimmed mean drops the components with the largest and smallest price changes each month and averages the rest. The median simply trims everything but the middle.

The FRED Blog has discussed trimmed-mean inflation before. In “Measuring inflation trends,” we compared headline and core PCE inflation with the trimmed mean PCE calculated by the Dallas Fed.

Other inflation measures available in FRED are the Cleveland Fed's trimmed-mean CPI and the sticky price CPI from the Atlanta Fed.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “Median PCE Inflation” and select “Percent Change from Year Ago.” Click “Edit Graph” and select the “Add Line” tab to search for “Median PCE Inflation, Percent Change from Preceding Period.” Don’t forget to click “Add data series.” Next, use the “Format” tab to customize Line 2 by selecting “Y-Axis position: Right.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

About the FRED Blog

These brief articles use data and graphing features in FRED®, our free data service. They illustrate timely economic concepts and best practices for using data. Views expressed are not necesarily those of the St. Louis Fed or Federal Reserve System.