Producer Price Index — Commodities

The Producer Price Index (PPI) program releases about 10,000 PPIs for individual products and groups of products each month. PPIs are available for the output of nearly all industries in the goods-producing sectors of the U.S. economy — mining, manufacturing, agriculture, fishing, and forestry — as well as natural gas, electricity, construction, and goods competitive with those made in the producing sectors, such as waste and scrap materials. The PPI program covers approximately 72 percent of the service sector's output, as measured by revenue reported in the 2007 Economic Census, with data for industries in wholesale and retail trade; transportation and warehousing; information; finance and insurance; real estate brokering, rental, and leasing; professional, scientific, and technical services; administrative, support, and waste management services; health care and social assistance; and accommodation.

To the extent possible, prices used in constructing the indexes are the actual revenue or net transaction prices producers receive for sales of their outputs. Scientific (probability) sampling techniques are used to select reporting establishments, products, and transactions for all types and volumes of output.

The commodity classification structure of the PPI organizes products by similarity of end use or material composition, regardless of whether the products are classified as primary or secondary in their industry of origin. This hierarchical system starts with major commodity groupings (2-digit level), then subgroups (3-digit), product classes (4-digit), subproduct classes (5- and 6-digit), item groupings (7-digit), and individual items (8-, 9-, and 10-digit levels). Commodity-based Final Demand-Intermediate Demand (FD-ID) price indexes regroup commodities at the subproduct class (six-digit) level, according to the class of buyer and the amount of physical processing or assembling the products have undergone.

More than 4,000 commodity price indexes organized by product, service, and end use are available, with some indexes by Final Demand-Intermediate Demand and by durability of product available back to 1947. Seasonally adjusted data are available for about 360 commodity indexes. Observations are monthly. Annual averages are available for all series published each month of the year that are unadjusted for seasonality. All indexes are stored with one decimal place. Updates are made near the middle of the month following a given reference month. Data are subject to revision four months after their original publication.

References: BLS Handbook of Methods, Chapter 14, "Producer Prices", Online at http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch14.htm