The Consumer Price Index measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative market basket of consumer goods and services, including food, energy, housing, apparel, transportation and medical care. In the United States it is compiled monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from roughly 94,000 monthly price quotations collected from about 6,000 housing units and 22,000 retail establishments across urban areas, with the CPI-U (all urban consumers) and CPI-W (urban wage earners and clerical workers) as its two main variants alongside a chained version, C-CPI-U. First calculated in a systematic form during World War I to help set wage adjustments, the CPI is the most widely cited US inflation gauge, used to index Social Security benefits, federal tax brackets and many private wage and rent contracts, and equivalent national CPIs are compiled by statistical agencies worldwide, such as Eurostat's Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices for the European Union.
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