About United States CPI Median YoY
In the United States, Median CPI is the one-month inflation rate of the component whose expenditure weight is in the 50th percentile of price changes. To calculate the median CPI, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland looks at the prices of the goods and services published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But instead of calculating an inflation rate that is a weighted average of all of the items in the CPI, as the BLS does, the Cleveland Fed ranks the inflation rates of the components of the CPI and picks the one in the middle of the distribution—that is, the item whose expenditure weight is in the 50th percentile of the price change distribution.