April Consumer Price Index report: When does it come out? How high is inflation?
The BLS will release the April CPI report this morning. A look at how inflationary pressure in the economy has shifted over the last year.
At 8:30 am ET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release the April Consumer Price Index report.
In March, prices rose 0.1 percent, following a combined 0.9 percent increase in February and January. From January to March of 2023, there has been an overall increase of one percent in prices due to inflation. In contrast to the 2.4 percent increase in prices observed during the equivalent period in 2022, there has been a notable decrease in inflationary pressures over the past year.
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What sectors are driving inflation?
While last year, inflation was driven by rapidly rising energy costs, supply chain breakdowns, and corporate greed, the landscape is changing.
In February, the BLS reported that seventy percent of the increase in average prices could be attributed to the housing sector. This trend continued in March, with the year-over-year increase in price clocking in at 8.2 percent—similar to that seen for food (8.5 percent). Food prices remain impacted by inflation as well, highlighting that for the average household, rapid increases in prices have been impossible to avoid.
For wages, this has meant that over the last year, real earnings have fallen by 0.7 percent between March 2022 and March 2023. But prices are not the only variable that impacts real wages, the other is the amount of hours worked. The BLS tracked a 0.9 percent fall in the “average workweek,” which combined with the impact of inflation pushed real earnings down 1.6 percent over the last year.