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U.S. insurance price index

Name: U.S. insurance price index (CPI-U)
Creator: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
License: https://www.usa.gov/government-works

What official price statistics say insurance is doing, pulled straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and updated when BLS publishes.

Reference period July 2026·Data retrieved August 27, 2026·Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Insurance pricing conversations tend to run on anecdote — a renewal that jumped, a neighbour who switched carriers. The Consumer Price Index is the closest thing to an objective national read on the same question, and it is free and public. This page pulls the relevant CPI series and shows them without commentary bolted onto the numbers.

Consumer Price Index, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted — July 2026
Series	Index level	Year over year	Month over month	Our guides
Motor vehicle insurance BLS series CUUR0000SETE	856.080	-4.5%	-0.3%	Auto insurance, Commercial auto insurance
Tenants' and household insurance BLS series CUUR0000SEHC	442.503	+3.2%	+0.3%	Homeowners insurance, Renters insurance
Health insurance BLS series CUUR0000SEMF	132.820	-2.7%	-0.5%	Health insurance
Medical care services BLS series CUUR0000SAM2	654.347	+2.7%	+0.3%	Health insurance, Medicare
All items (headline CPI) BLS series CUUR0000SA0	333.918	+3.4%	0.0%	—

Index levels are not comparable between rows — each series is measured against its own base period. The percent-change columns are comparable. Year-over-year compares July 2026 with July 2025.

How to read the table

In the reference period, motor vehicle insurance fell 4.5% against the same month a year earlier, slower than the +3.4% change in the headline all-items index — a gap of 7.9 percentage points. Tenants' and household insurance, the series that tracks homeowners and renters coverage, rose 3.2%. Medical care services, the broad measure of what healthcare actually costs to deliver, rose 2.7%.

Two cautions before drawing conclusions from any of that. The first is that CPI is a national aggregate; insurance is priced in state-approved rating territories, and a national figure can be flat while your own market moves sharply. The second is that insurance lines are repriced in discrete steps through regulatory filings rather than continuously, so a single month tells you very little. The multi-year direction is the part worth reading.

The health insurance line is not your premium

This is the trap in the table, so it is worth stating plainly. The CPI health insurance series fell 2.7% year over year, and that number has almost nothing to do with what employees or marketplace enrollees pay.

BLS does not measure health insurance premiums directly. The reasoning is that a premium is mostly a claim on medical services — hospital stays, physician visits, prescription drugs — whose prices the index already measures in their own categories. Counting the premium as well would double-count them. So the health insurance series is constructed to capture only the residual: insurers' retained earnings, meaning premiums collected less benefits paid. It is derived from annual insurer financial statements and therefore moves with a long lag and on margin, not on price. If you want the series that behaves like healthcare cost inflation, use medical care services.

What is actually driving these numbers

An insurance premium is a forecast of what claims will cost. So the honest way to read the table above is to look at what insurers are paying out, which the CPI also measures. These are the input costs, and they lead premiums rather than follow them — a repair-cost increase shows up in rate filings roughly a year later, because filings have to clear state approval first.

Claim cost inputs, July 2026 — same CPI source as the table above
Input cost	Year over year	Why it moves premiums
Motor vehicle maintenance and repair BLS series CUUR0000SETD	+6.6%	Most of an auto claim is a repair bill. When labour and parts rise, claim severity rises with them, and rate filings follow about a year later. See: Auto insurance
Motor vehicle body work BLS series CUUR0000SS62031	+2.3%	Collision claims specifically. Body shop rates are the largest component of a repairable-vehicle claim. See: Auto insurance
Used cars and trucks BLS series CUUR0000SETA02	-1.9%	A total loss is settled at actual cash value, so used-vehicle prices set what insurers pay to write a car off. See: Auto insurance
New vehicles BLS series CUUR0000SETA01	+0.5%	Newer vehicles carry more sensors and calibration work, which raises the cost of repairs that used to be simple. See: Auto insurance
Hospital services BLS series CUUR0000SEMD	+5.4%	Hospital pricing is the largest single input to health plan costs, and to the bodily injury side of auto and liability claims. See: Health insurance, Medicare
Shelter BLS series CUUR0000SAH1	+3.2%	Rebuild cost, not market value, is what a home policy insures. Construction and shelter costs set the dwelling limit insurers must carry. See: Homeowners insurance, Renters insurance

Read the two tables against each other. Where an input cost is rising faster than the insurance line that depends on it, the gap is pressure that has not been priced in yet. Where the insurance line has already moved further than its inputs, the repricing has happened and may be ahead of the underlying cost.

Method

A build-time script calls the BLS public timeseries API, requests the five series listed above for the current and two prior years, and writes the response to a data file that this page renders. Year-over-year is computed as the ratio of the latest published index level to the level in the same calendar month a year earlier; month-over-month uses the immediately preceding month. Both are rounded to one decimal place. Because the comparison is month-on-same-month, the not-seasonally-adjusted series is the correct one to use and no further adjustment is applied.

The BLS public API requires no key and is rate limited, so the fetch is a separate step from the build. If a fetch fails, the previous data file is kept and this page continues to show the reference period it was built from — which is why the retrieval date is printed at the top rather than hidden.

What this page will not tell you

Your renewal. CPI is a national average across all urban consumers. Your premium is one insurer's price for one risk in one territory.
State-level movement. BLS publishes regional CPI breakdowns, but not insurance sub-indices at state level. For state figures, your department of insurance publishes approved rate filings.
Why prices moved. The index records the change, not the cause. Repair cost inflation, litigation trends, reinsurance pricing and catastrophe losses all feed in and none of them are separable here.
Where prices go next. Nothing on this page is a forecast.

Frequently asked questions

Directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics public API, which serves the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted. We pull the series, compute the year-over-year and month-over-month changes from the published index levels, and render them. We do not adjust, smooth or forecast the figures, and we do not add any of our own.

Because the series do not share a base period. An index level is only meaningful against its own history — it says how prices in that category compare with that category's own reference period, which for most CPI series is 1982-84 = 100 but for others is a later date. That is why the table shows percent changes alongside the levels: the percent changes are comparable across rows, the levels are not.

Almost certainly not, and this is the most misread series in the whole CPI. BLS does not price health insurance premiums directly, because a premium bundles medical services whose prices are already measured elsewhere in the index. Instead the health insurance series measures insurers' retained earnings — roughly, premiums minus benefits paid out. It moves on insurer margins with a long reporting lag, not on what you pay. The medical care services line is much closer to what most people mean by health costs.

Auto insurance is repriced through state rate filings rather than continuously, so increases arrive in large steps that clear regulatory approval and then flow into the index over several months. When a wave of filings works through, the year-over-year figure can swing many points in either direction. Read the direction and the multi-year trend, not any single month.

BLS publishes CPI monthly, roughly two weeks after the month it covers. The reference period shown at the top of the table is the most recent month BLS had released when we last refreshed, and the fetch date is shown beside it. If the reference period looks stale, the source has not published since.

No. CPI is a national aggregate across all urban consumers. Your renewal is set by one insurer, in one rating territory, against your own claims history and coverage. The index tells you which way the national market is moving, which is useful context when a renewal quote arrives — it does not tell you what that quote will say.

Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Consumer Price Index. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index (CPI-U, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted). Retrieved August 27, 2026 via the BLS public data API.
BLS — Measuring Price Change in the CPI: Health insurance, for the retained-earnings methodology described above.
National Association of Insurance Commissioners, for the state rate-filing process that produces the stepped repricing pattern.

InsureWiseHub editorial team

Every figure on this page is machine-read from the BLS public API and rendered without manual entry, which is the only way we could stand behind updating it this often. Read our editorial policy.