Poor people tend to spend more of their income on food than wealthy people. As a result, the official headline consumer price index (CPI) for lowest spending households (decile 1) features much higher weights on food than the highest spending households (decile 10). In the recent update of CPI weights using 2023 estimates, the weight on food for the lowest spending households was reduced to around 40%. The CPI weight for transport is much higher for higher spending households. The recent update saw an increase in the weight of housing and utilities in decile 1 and 10 CPI baskets.
Historical CPI weights dating back to 1970 are available on our EconData platform for enterprise subscribers. To our knowledge, EconData is the only source offering these historical weights for easy download in Excel, R, or Python. Get in touch if you are interested in subscribing.
Compiled by Jan-Hendrik Pretorius
