Sticker Shock charts what everyday things have cost in the U.S. since 1950, from a cup of coffee to a mortgage, and what they cost today in 32,038 cities and towns.
Public sources, listed item by item on the how it works page: government agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Energy Information Administration and the Social Security Administration, and industry surveys such as KFF’s and the College Board’s. Some items have no published national price, and those are labeled as estimates. Prices update twice a day from the BLS and FRED.
You’re free to share and adapt Sticker Shock’s data, charts and text, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). Please credit “Sticker Shock” with a link to the page you used. Figures taken from other publishers remain subject to their own terms.
Every item page has its year-by-year table as a CSV download and an embeddable chart. The monthly report lists what got more expensive over the past year.
Found a number that looks wrong, or have a question about the data? Email jack@wilbankswebdesign.com with the page and what you found.
Visitors can ask for items that aren’t built in. Those charts are estimated by an AI model from published price data, are labeled as AI-estimated, and aren’t used on the price, year or city pages.