by Kevin Schofield
There’s been a lot of attention on inflation as it soared during 2021 and 2022 and then slowly came back down to Earth in the past year. But what does inflation measure? As constructed by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), it’s a complicated mixture of several weighted components. One of the largest of those is shelter costs — which, for many of us, means rent. Shelter costs make up 32% of the BLS’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most commonly used index for broad-based inflation.
The BLS has its own way of collecting and analyzing data on residential rent prices, but it is hardly alone; several other organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, publish their own statistics on rent. And none of them agree (if they did, most of them would probably have stopped publishing by now). But which should we trust?
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