Inflation Has Spiked the Most – 2021 Study

By the end of July 2021, the price of gasoline had surged almost 42% over the previous 12 months and the price of used vehicles spiked at nearly the same rate. While skyrocketing prices of these two commodities are the most dramatic examples of rising prices in today’s economic environment, they illustrate a simple truth: inflation is soaring.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the change in prices paid by consumers for goods and services, increased 5.4% during the 12-month period that ended in July 2021, and the same for the 12-month period ending in June 2021. Fueled by massive consumer spending and supply chain bottlenecks, national inflation is at its highest level since July 2008 when the CPI rose 5.6% from a year earlier. In fact, between 1990 and 2020, inflation grew by only 2.4% per year, far below the current year’s pace. With so much attention on inflation, SmartAsset set out to determine the places in the U.S. where the price of goods and services has spiked the most.

Data and Methodology

To find out where inflation has spiked the most, we examined all 23 U.S. metro areas with available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. However, data for each metro area is not released every month. As a result, the most recent changes in the CPI for 11 metro areas are for the 12-month period ending June 2021, while the rest are as of the 12-month period ending July 2021.

Key Findings

• Inflation is highest in the Atlanta, Georgia metro area. The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell metro area saw the price of goods and services jump 6.7% in the 12-period that ended in June 2021. This is the highest increase of all 23 metro areas for which BLS data is available.
• High cost of living areas have been impacted the least. New York, New York; San Francisco, California and Los Angeles, California may be known for their high costs of living, but inflation spikes in these metro areas have been among the lowest across large metro areas. San Francisco has seen the smallest 12-month inflation spike – just 3.2% as of June 2021.