The Nowflation guide — how to use the site, and every term defined

A guided tour and a glossary on one page. The tour: start on the dashboard (Nowflation Realtime, the headline measurement of prices today; the Nowflation CPI Gauge, the estimate of what official CPI would read today, with its seasonally adjusted pace; what CPI will print; the official number and the gap), understand the two numbers on the Nowflation Realtime page, Why the Gap? and The Gauge, Exposed, check the forecast (locked into a receipt the evening before each print) and the public scoreboard, go deep on the macro trackers (the macro dashboard, GDP nowcast, recession risk, jobs, housing, consumer stress, money and liquidity, fiscal and tariffs), then make it yours with My Inflation, the cart, the since-date calculator and the fall calculators, compare any two of 1,684 series in the directory, and embed any chart.

The glossary defines every name the site uses in plain English: Nowflation Realtime (the headline) and the Nowflation CPI Gauge, live and reconstructed records, the all-tenant rent index, the home affordability measure, coverage, pace, the base period (January 2018 = 100) and the gap; the Nowflation Forecast, the ensemble, pre-registration, vintage-true backtests, live grading, MAE and bias, the Street consensus, the Cleveland Fed nowcast and Kalshi; GDP nowcasts, the Weekly Economic Index, the Sahm rule, the 10y−3m curve, CFNAI and the regional Fed surveys; breakevens and the 5y5y forward, supercore, the underlying measures, financial conditions, net liquidity and import prices; JOLTS, jobless claims, real disposable income, the saving rate, the Consumer Stress Index and buy ÷ rent; and how the site stays honest — vintage-true history, open data, the system status gate and the embed widgets.

The five-minute tour

Start on the dashboard. The headline is Nowflation Realtime — year-over-year inflation from the prices being set today, 3.19% as of October 19, 2026 — beside the Nowflation CPI Gauge, the estimate of what CPI would read with its inputs refreshed today (3.44% as of October 19, 2026, with a seasonally adjusted three-month pace of 3.93% annualized), the official CPI (3.7% for September 2026) and the Gauge's gap to it (-0.26pp). Below the hero: every component, the basket and the gap history back to January 2019.

Understand the two numbers. Nowflation Realtime is the headline measurement of prices today: live market prices wherever a credible source exists, the latest official reading (labeled as held) where none does, and never tuned to match CPI. The Nowflation CPI Gauge is built to sit next to the official index: the same basket, BLS weights and construction, with live market prices where they have a better record than the survey; it is the bridge to the print and feeds the forecast. What a buyer pays each month for a home (price × current mortgage rate) is an affordability measure on the housing page, not an inflation rate. Why the Gauge and the print differ is on the Why-the-Gap page, every input is on The Gauge, Exposed, the two machines side by side are on Gauge vs BLS, and the full source inventory and changelog are on the methodology page.

Check the forecast and the scoreboard. The next CPI, for October 2026, is released November 10, 2026; the Nowflation Forecast is 3.86%, the current call until it is locked the evening before the release. After every print the scoreboard grades that call against the Cleveland Fed nowcast, the Street consensus and the Kalshi market; rows tagged BACKTEST are the model run on past data to validate it, not live calls. Whether the Gauge leads the CPI at all is tested on the lead-test page with the naive benchmark on every chart.

Go deeper on the economy. The macro dashboard is the wide shot; the GDP nowcast, recession risk (with financial conditions), jobs, housing, consumer stress, money and liquidity, and the fiscal page (tariffs, debt, interest) are the chapters; oil, energy, rates and Fed Watch cover markets. Each page carries the key numbers, the charts and a plain-English descriptor.

Make it yours. My Inflation reweights the basket to your spending; the grocery cart prices your own basket from BLS shelf data; the since-date calculator answers "how much more than in 2020?" at daily resolution; the fall calculators cover the Social Security COLA, the I-Bond rate and the tax brackets. Any two of the 1,684 series in the directory can be overlaid on one chart, and any chart can be embedded on another site.

How it updates and how it stays honest

The engine recomputes and republishes every morning before the US market opens (recomputed 7:55 AM & 6 PM ET · published 8:05 AM ET · 8:45 AM ET on print days). Different pieces move at their own pace by design: fuel daily; the all-tenant rent index monthly, as each month's new leases land; the remaining components hold at the latest official print until the next release. Every number traces to a named source; history is stored vintage-true and never silently revised; the morning publish is blocked automatically if a critical data-integrity check fails, and those checks are public on the status page. It is a measurement and forecasting tool, not investment advice.

The glossary — every term the site uses, in plain English

Third-party names (Cleveland Fed, GDPNow, Kalshi) are defined as their owners use them. The shorter, query-shaped glossary (nowcast, supercore, OER, base effects, breakevens) has its own page.

The two series

Nowflation Realtime: Our headline number: a daily measurement of the prices being set in the US economy today, year over year. Where a live market price exists it is used (pump prices, vehicle auction and transaction prices, rents on leases signed this month); where no credible live source exists, the latest official reading is held and labeled as held. It is not tuned to match CPI or any other index, so its gap to CPI is part of what it shows. It is judged on how much of its basket is live, how old its inputs are, and whether official CPI moves toward it in the months that follow.
Nowflation CPI Gauge: An estimate of what official CPI would read if its inputs were refreshed today — 25 input series across the 21 CPI components (live market prices spliced onto the official BLS subindexes), weighted to the official CPI basket and kept on CPI's own construction, including the slow way shelter moves as old leases roll over. Base period January 2018 = 100. It is the bridge between Nowflation Realtime and the print and it feeds the Nowflation Forecast; it is a measurement, not itself a forecast.
Live and reconstructed: Every Nowflation reading carries one of two record labels. Live: stored as published that day and never rewritten. Reconstructed: computed afterwards over history under the current method, so it shows what the method gives for that date, not a reading that was published on it.
CPI-comparable: The internal name of the construction behind the Nowflation CPI Gauge. It measures shelter with rental-equivalence like the BLS does, but from an all-tenant rent index measured this month instead of a survey that reprices each unit every six months.
All-tenant rent index: New-lease rents (Zillow ZORI, Apartment List) averaged over the trailing 48 months with weights that decay at the lease turnover rate — what every tenant is paying this month, not just the marginal one. Used as measured; how far it runs ahead of official rent is measured, not assumed — the lead and its naive benchmark are on the lead-test page.
Home affordability measure: The whole CPI basket with owners' shelter priced as the monthly payment on a typical home (home price × the Freddie Mac 30-year rate, 20% down) instead of rental equivalence, tracked year over year on the housing page. It is a basket measure for a household buying now, not an inflation rate; beside it is the year-over-year change in the payment it prices in (the typical home at the latest weekly rate against the home a year earlier at the rate then).
Coverage: The share of a series' basket priced from independent market data (rents, fuel, used cars) ahead of the official print, shown for each series. The rest holds at the latest official reading between releases.
Pace (SA): The seasonally adjusted 1-month and 3-month change in the CPI Gauge, annualized — where inflation is running right now, as opposed to the year-over-year figure that carries twelve months of history.
Base period: January 2018 = 100. Every index is scaled so that January 2018 reads 100, which makes cumulative change easy to read.
Cumulative since 2018: Total price change since the base period — literally the index minus 100.
The gap: The difference between the Nowflation CPI Gauge and official BLS CPI. Over time its largest structural source is shelter timing, 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 with the component that drives it on the Realtime page.

The forecast & scoreboard

Nowflation Forecast: Our official call for the next CPI print, locked into a dated receipt the evening before the release. It is the ensemble (below) — the number we put on the record and grade in public.
Ensemble: An inverse-error-weighted blend of our in-house model, the Cleveland Fed nowcast, and the Street consensus — each weighted by its own graded accuracy. More robust than any single input, and our official forecast.
Nowflation Model: Our independent in-house model that builds a CPI forecast bottom-up, component by component, from live data. One input into the ensemble (formerly labeled “Nowcast”).
Pre-registration: Locking a forecast on the record before the number is released, with a dated, immutable receipt — so a call can never be quietly changed after the fact.
Backtest (walk-forward): A model run retroactively on only the data that existed the day before each PAST release. It validates the model; it is NOT a live track record. Marked “BACKTEST” on the scoreboard.
Live-graded: A forecast actually made before a print and graded after it lands. The June 2026 CPI print (released July 14, 2026) was our first live-graded call; every print since is graded the same way.
The Lead Test: The page that asks, in public, whether our series carry information about CPI months ahead that CPI’s own history does not — with the naive benchmark on every chart.
MAE (mean absolute error): The average size of a forecaster’s misses, in percentage points. Lower = more accurate. The scoreboard ranks by this.
Bias: The average signed error. Positive means the forecaster tends to run hot (over-predict); negative means it runs cool.
Closest-call %: How often a forecaster was the single nearest to the actual print.
Street consensus: The market’s expected print for a release. On this site it is FMP’s economic-calendar estimate, dated when the engine read it; FMP often posts it before the surveys of economists close.
Cleveland Fed nowcast: The Cleveland Fed’s model estimate of the current inflation print. “Nowcast” is their term — we keep it for their series.
Kalshi implied: The CPI value implied by prices on the Kalshi prediction market — what real-money bettors expect. Displayed and graded, never a model input.

Growth & recession

GDP nowcast: A live estimate of current-quarter GDP growth before the official BEA release — GDPNow (Atlanta Fed), the St. Louis Fed news-index nowcast, and the Weekly Economic Index.
Weekly Economic Index (WEI): A high-frequency activity index scaled to GDP growth, updated weekly.
Sahm rule: A recession trigger based on how far unemployment has risen off its low; it fires at +0.50 and has flagged past recessions early.
Yield curve (10y−3m): The spread between the 10-year and 3-month Treasury. Inversion (below zero) has preceded every modern recession.
Recession probability: Model estimates of recession odds — both coincident (Chauvet-Piger) and yield-curve-based.
CFNAI: Chicago Fed National Activity Index — a broad activity composite where 0 = trend growth; below −0.70 flags recession.
Regional Fed surveys: The Empire State, Philadelphia, and Dallas Fed manufacturing surveys — the free public stand-ins for the (paid) ISM PMI.
Hard vs soft data: Hard data is measured activity (retail sales, industrial production, housing starts); soft data is surveys and sentiment. Surveys turn first; hard data usually wins the argument.

Prices, expectations & conditions

Breakevens: The inflation rate implied by inflation-protected Treasuries (TIPS) — what markets price for future inflation. Shown at 5 and 10 years.
5y/5y forward: The market’s expected average inflation over 5 years, starting 5 years from now — the Fed’s preferred market gauge.
Survey expectations: What households (University of Michigan) and models (Cleveland Fed) expect for future inflation.
Supercore: Core services inflation excluding housing — the stickiest, most closely-watched slice for the Fed.
Underlying measures: The Cleveland Fed median and trimmed-mean CPI, the Dallas Fed trimmed-mean PCE and the Atlanta Fed sticky CPI — the statistical cores Fed staff watch, all on one table on the CPI Gauge vs BLS page.
Financial conditions (NFCI): One number for how loose or tight financial markets are. Positive = tighter than average, a headwind to growth and inflation.
Net liquidity: The Fed’s balance sheet minus the Treasury General Account minus reverse repo — the cash actually available to markets, the line traders overlay on equities.
Import / export prices: BLS price indexes for what the US imports and exports. Import prices lead goods inflation — the tariff/passthrough channel.
The pipeline: The causal chain from futures to producer costs to wholesale to the shelf to the CPI, drawn as a page: the stage a price is in tells you when it reaches the CPI.

Labor & the consumer

JOLTS: Job openings and the quits rate. The quits rate leads wages — when quitting slows, wage growth cools.
Jobless claims: Weekly initial and continued unemployment claims — the highest-frequency read on the labor market.
Real disposable income: Household income after taxes and inflation — the fuel behind spending.
Personal saving rate: The share of income households save. A falling rate with flat real income signals a consumer running on fumes.
Consumer Stress Index: Seven official series (delinquencies, card APR, saving rate, debt service, revolving credit, continuing claims) scored by percentile against their own 2019-now range and weighted into one 0–100 dial.
Buy ÷ rent: The monthly principal-and-interest payment on the typical home divided by the typical asking rent. Above 1.0 = an ownership premium.

Data & how we stay honest

Vintage: How each series' history is stored, in its own words. Method changes ship in a dated changelog. Nowflation Realtime. Live readings from 2026-09-15 are stored as published and never rewritten. Method v2.2 since 2026-09-28 (v2.0 before; readings published under v2.0 are unchanged). Values before 2026-09-15 are a reconstruction under method v2.0. Nowflation CPI Gauge. Method v1.5 since September 28, 2026, v1.4 before that (the archive was recomputed once under v1.4, on September 8). Readings are kept as published, as logged on the corrections page. They have not changed since.
Open data: 1,684 series from 26 sources, all browsable, chartable and comparable; the public-data series download as CSV and JSON — no key, no paywall.
System status: A live self-test of data integrity and freshness. The morning publish is blocked automatically if a critical check fails — so a stale or wrong number never reaches the site.
Embed: A copy-paste iframe widget of any series for your own site, reading our cached public data and staying current.

Zillow data: Data Provided by Zillow Group.