State Street PriceStats recorded a 0.41 percent increase in monthly inflation on a non‑seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis, following a more moderate 0.18 percent rise in January. This represents the largest February increase in the series since 2022. As a result, annual inflation edged back up to 2.75 percent in February — nearly matching the pace seen in December 2025 — despite easing in January. The uptick was driven by renewed acceleration in transportation prices and above‑average increases in food and household goods.

State Street PriceStats enables daily inflation measurement with just a three-day lag, offering timely insights that complement traditional government statistics. It serves as a valuable leading indicator and is especially useful during periods when government releases are delayed or unavailable. Its daily insights are increasingly relevant for policymakers, investors, and analysts seeking to track inflation dynamics in real time.

Covering over 27 countries and multiple sectors — including food, health, and transportation — State Street PriceStats uses consistent methodologies to ensure its indicators are comparable across geographies, time periods, and official data sources.
 

Despite a disinflation trend that began in late 2025, February’s uptick in the State Street PriceStats annual rate — together with continued price increases — suggests that renewed upward momentum in annual inflation is likely to persist. Within the US State Street PriceStats sector series, inflation in February exceeded five-year averages in food, household goods, and recreation. Despite remaining slightly below typical seasonal rates, transportation prices (including gasoline) increased at nearly double last year’s pace, contributing meaningfully to the rise in the annual rate.

Historically, monthly inflation in the State Street PriceStats series begins to soften around mid‑February as the rebound from seasonal holiday discounting in recreation and electronics subsides. This year, by contrast, upward price pressures have remained firm since mid-January across most State Street PriceStats‑tracked sectors, led by strong increases in food, household goods, and accelerating transportation prices. Expectations point to sustained upward pressure on global fuel prices amid the ongoing conflict in Iran. In the two weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we observed a rapid 15 percent rise in retail fuel prices. We are already closely tracking the impact on prices so far in March.

About the State Street PriceStats Indicators

The State Street PriceStats series is designed to provide a low-latency and high-frequency view into inflation trends that are comparable to official CPI. The features of the process are as follows:

• Daily online price collection: State Street PriceStats collects price data daily from over 1,500 multi-line retailers using web scraping technologies, focusing on those with both online and physical stores. Research has shown that retailers tend to adjust online prices first.
• Data structuring and cleaning: Models then clean and standardize raw price data to ensure consistency across more than 40 million products, converting unstructured HTML into structured datasets ready for analysis.
• Categorization and quality checks: State Street PriceStats categorizes prices by economic sectors and sub-sectors, calculates performance statistics and applies a red-flag system with daily manual checks to resolve data anomalies.
• Index calculation using econometric techniques: State Street PriceStats computes daily inflation statistics using proprietary econometric methods and publishes the results with a three-day lag.
• Retailer and product selection: State Street PriceStats selects retailers based on market share and city presence and includes over 500,000 daily prices — far exceeding the 80,000 monthly prices used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Use of CPI weights and no quality adjustments: State Street PriceStats applies official CPI weights where possible and adjusts for online data characteristics, calculating price changes only from consecutive observations of identical products without applying standard quality adjustments.