Announcement to Users of CPI Data

Effective with the release of January 1998 data on February 24, 1998, the Consumer Price Index will undergo many changes as a result of our 1998 weight revision. In addition to updates to expenditure weights and changes to the composition of some group and subgroup indexes, there will also be changes in the availability of and item codes for published item and area indexes. A concordance between the old series and the revised series for CPI items is available in the item concordance. A list of published areas is available.

Please see The 1998 CPI Revision documents on our World Wide Web site at http://www.bls.gov/cpi/ for more detailed information about the CPI Revision.

Changes to Databases: As always, the most up-to-date CPI data will be found in CU (Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers) and CW (Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers). Starting on February 24, the new CPI item structure and coding system will be in place in the CU and CW database. Complete historical information for all continuous series, using the new coding structure, will continue to reside in the CU and CW databases.

Two other databases, MU and MW will be available on February 24. These databases will be set up using the old item structure and coding system. They will contain indexes through December 1997 for discontinued CPI series. For the first six months of 1998, overlap indexes will be posted to the MU and MW databases. See the Publication Strategy article in the CPI Revision documents for more details.

MU and MW are accessible to users from the same database tools as the CU and CW series (Series Report and Create Customized Tables (mulitple screens) on the Web, and file transfer from our FTP server).

Special "research" series (showing some history using the new item structure) for Housing, Other Goods and Services, Fuels and Utilities. Fruits and Vegetables, and Household Furnishings and Operations will be available on our FTP server in the "special requests/cpi" directory as cpihistrsrch.txt.

For information about the databases, please contact Sharon Gibson on (202) 606-6968 or by email.

Last Modified Date: June 16, 2003