Which indicator answers my question?
Choose measures for prices, jobs, pay, output, spending, housing, rates and states. Find official sources for household income, poverty, wealth and trade outside this catalog.
Research the U.S. economy
Start with a question, choose measures that fit it, and retain the evidence behind the answer.
How has the U.S. economy changed since 2019?
Compare prices, jobs, spending and production at matched endpoints. Distinguish real growth, nominal sales, and employment ratios, with exact input values and a calculation download.
What changed in the latest revisions?
Compare two preserved acquisitions for identical periods. See revised GDP growth and state accounts, separate source corrections, and reproduce an older research view.
Are average hourly earnings keeping up with inflation?
Compare matching monthly growth rates, then use the exact real-wage formula. Average earnings can change with the worker mix; this is not the raise of a typical fixed worker.
Where is the housing construction pipeline changing?
Compare three distinct stages at the same monthly annual-rate scale. Permit revisions, sampling uncertainty and construction lags prevent treating them as one cohort.
Which state economies are growing fastest?
Compare full-year real GDP growth with the size of each economy and its history. A high growth rank does not establish a large contribution to national growth.
How do price levels differ across states?
Use same-year regional price parities for an illustrative purchasing-power calculation. The result is a basket comparison, not a household budget or a state inflation rate.
Choose a fair comparison before reading a trend
Match the geography, observation frequency, units and seasonal adjustment at both endpoints. A month of payroll jobs, a quarter of GDP and a week of unemployment insurance claims have different timing and populations. Separate panels allow descriptive comparison; they do not create an unobserved common frequency.
Published levels, percent changes and percentage-point differences answer different questions. Indexing two series to 100 compares relative paths from a named shared starting observation, while retaining the original definitions. A rate already in percent can increase by one percentage point without increasing by one percent.
Retain the exact calculation
Each worked comparison provides the actual input periods, source identities, transformation and snapshot. Download the displayed table when citing a result. Raw histories provide the underlying source levels; they are a separate output. Keep the file checksum and note whether the source later revised the same observation.
These workflows describe measured changes. They do not prove causation, reconstruct a complete historical information set or substitute ranks for the underlying values. Use the methods, revision policy and each measure’s limitations to define the bounds of a conclusion.