The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), calculated by BLS, provides a measure of the average change in the prices paid by urban consumers for a fixed market basket of goods and services relative to the price of that basket during the 1982-1984 period. The U.S. index is based on the prices of goods and services, including food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education, and communication, that people buy for day-to-day living in urban areas across the country. U.S. data are published in the monthly BLS news release, Consumer Price Index. BLS publishes total Boston CPI data every other month. The geographic sampling unit for the Boston CPI encompasses the Boston-Brockton-Nashua metropolitan area (including parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut), but is not necessarily comparable to the Boston-Cambridge- Quincy NECTA.
Although BLS provides both unadjusted and seasonally adjusted CPI data, only unadjusted data appear in Indicators because BLS recommends that unadjusted data be used to measure escalation in prices.
Source
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm
http://www.bls.gov/ro1/home.htm#news