The vocabulary a reader meets on this site and in every CPI story — each term defined in two sentences, with the page that shows it. Third-party names (Cleveland Fed, Kalshi) are defined as their owners use them; the longer site guide is on the guide page.
| Term | Definition | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Nowflation Realtime | The site's headline measure: the year-over-year change in the prices being set in the US economy today, on the CPI basket. Where a credible live market price exists it is used (pump prices, vehicle auction and transaction prices, rents on leases signed this month); everywhere else the latest official BLS reading is held and labeled as held. It is never tuned to match the CPI, so its gap to the print is part of what it shows. | the Nowflation Realtime page |
| Nowflation CPI Gauge | An estimate of what official CPI would read if its inputs were refreshed today: CPI's own basket, weights and construction, including the slow way shelter moves as old leases roll over, with live market prices only where they have a better record than the survey. It is the bridge between Nowflation Realtime and the print, and it feeds the Nowflation Forecast. | the Gauge, Exposed page |
| Nowcast | A nowcast is an estimate of a statistic for the current period before the official release — for inflation, an estimate of this month's CPI while the month is still under way. Nowflation publishes three distinct things: Nowflation Realtime, its headline measurement of prices today; the Nowflation CPI Gauge, an estimate of what official CPI would read with its inputs refreshed today; and a forecast of the next CPI print, locked into a receipt the evening before the release and graded after it. | the CPI forecast page |
| Supercore inflation | Core services excluding shelter — medical care, transportation services, recreation, education and the other services priced mostly on labor — the slice the Federal Reserve watches for wage-driven, self-sustaining inflation. On this site it is computed from the official subindexes for transportation services, water, sewer and trash, medical care, education and communication, and recreation, with the BLS weights renormalized, so it steps with every CPI print. The BLS splits medical care, education and communication, and recreation into goods and services; the index carries each of the three whole, goods included (medicines, televisions, computers and the like). Food, energy, shelter and the other goods groups are left out. | the supercore page |
| Owners' equivalent rent (OER) | OER is the CPI's measure of housing costs for homeowners: what an owner would pay to rent their own home, imputed from the rents of comparable rental units in the BLS rent panel rather than from mortgage payments or house prices. It is the single largest CPI component, which is why the rent panel's six-month repricing cycle matters so much for headline inflation. | the rent inflation page |
| All-tenant rent index | The Nowflation CPI Gauge's shelter measure: new-lease rents from Zillow and Apartment List averaged over the trailing 48 months of leases with weights that decay at the lease-turnover rate, so it reflects what the whole renting population pays this month rather than only the marginal tenant signing a lease. The Gauge uses it as measured on both the rent and the owners'-equivalent weight; its lead over the official rent index is tested separately. | the rent inflation page |
| Base effects | The year-over-year inflation rate compares this month's price level with the same month a year ago, so an unusually high or low month twelve months back mechanically pushes the annual rate down or up as it drops out of the comparison, regardless of what prices are doing now. The seasonally adjusted one- and three-month annualized pace strips the base out and shows the current run rate. | the current inflation rate page |
| Trimmed-mean and median CPI | Underlying-inflation measures from the Cleveland Fed (median CPI, 16% trimmed-mean CPI) and Dallas Fed (trimmed-mean PCE) that drop the components with the largest price moves each month and average the rest, filtering out one-off spikes such as eggs or airfares. They are shown next to headline and core on the every-measure table. | the Gauge-vs-BLS table |
| Breakeven inflation rate | The gap between the yield on a nominal Treasury and an inflation-protected Treasury (TIPS) of the same maturity — the average inflation rate at which the two pay the same, and so the market's priced expectation. The 5-year, 10-year and 5-year/5-year-forward breakevens are charted daily against the survey measures. | the inflation expectations page |
| Vintage (vintage-true data) | A vintage is a statistic exactly as it stood on a given date, before later revisions; a vintage-true backtest uses only the data that existed the day before each release, so it cannot borrow information from the future. Nowflation stores its own history vintage-true and never silently revises a published value. | the revision tracker |
| Seasonal adjustment (SA vs NSA) | Seasonal adjustment removes the regular calendar pattern (holiday sales, summer gasoline, January price resets) so month-to-month changes can be compared; BLS quotes the monthly change on the SA index and the year-over-year rate on the NSA index, where seasonality cancels. Nowflation follows the same convention, and its pace figures use the BLS gasoline factors. | the current inflation rate page |
| Pre-registration | A forecast written to the public record before the outcome is known, so it can be graded honestly and never edited after the fact. Nowflation locks each CPI call into a dated receipt the evening before the release, with a SHA-256 hash of the file; until then the call is provisional and moves with its inputs. The receipt record lists every month with its status: the earliest receipt was locked a week early without a hash, and a month whose receipt was written after the print is shown as not pre-registered and left out of the live record. Pre-registered calls are graded on the scoreboard next to the Cleveland Fed, the Street and Kalshi. | the CPI forecast page |
| Core CPI | The CPI excluding food and energy, the two most volatile groups, which gives a steadier read on the underlying trend; the Fed's inflation objective is stated on the headline PCE price index, a related BEA measure, and core PCE is the trend measure it watches most closely. Core is not "inflation without the things you buy" — it is a filter for what tends to persist. | the current inflation rate page |
| CPI-W | The Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, a narrower population than the headline CPI-U; the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment is set from its July–September average. The two indexes move almost identically month to month, which is what makes the COLA projectable from a CPI forecast. | the COLA estimate page |
| The gap | The difference between the Nowflation CPI Gauge and the latest official CPI print, in percentage points. Over time its largest structural source is shelter timing — rents measured this month versus a survey that reprices each unit every six months — while on a given day live pump and vehicle prices can move it more; it changes sign, and the gap page breaks today's figure down component by component. Nowflation Realtime has its own gap to CPI, shown on its page. | the Why the Gap page |
Zillow data: Data Provided by Zillow Group.