TV prices since 2016: what the government's price index shows through October 2026

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks what urban consumers pay for televisions as part of the consumer price index. Its series for Televisions in the U.S. city average, all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted, stood at 98.893 in October 2026, the latest month available on November 11, 2026, on a scale where December 2024 equals 100. In January 2016 the same series stood at 296.661. By our arithmetic that is a fall of 66.7%, leaving the index at about a third of its 2016 level, while the all-items index for urban consumers rose 42.5% over the same months. This page sets out the figures year by year, what changed in 2026 and what the index does and does not measure.

What the index measures

An index is not a price. It shows how prices for a category have moved relative to a base period, here December 2024. BLS rebased several series, the TV series among them, to December 2024 = 100 with the April 2026 data it published on May 12, 2026, and says that when it introduces a new base it recalculates each index back to the start of the series. Older published TV index figures on a different base therefore will not match the levels below. Percentage changes are the same on either base, apart from rounding, because rebasing scales every month by the same factor.

The series is not seasonally adjusted, so it includes regular patterns within the year. One shows in the data: in every year from 2016 to 2024, the index fell from October to November, by between 0.5% and 5.4% by our arithmetic. BLS does not give reasons for monthly moves in this table, and past patterns say nothing certain about the next one.

Year by year

The steepest falls in the table came in 2018 and 2019, when the December index dropped by about a fifth in each year. The one December-to-December rise came in 2021: the index climbed from 130.145 in December 2020 to a peak of 150.415 in August 2021, up 15.6% by our arithmetic, before falling back to 135.915 by December. Declines resumed in 2022 and 2023, slowed to 4.2% in 2024 and widened to 7.3% in 2025. From 2017 to 2025, in every year except 2021, the TV index moved in the opposite direction to the all-items index, which rose each year.

2026 so far, and the missing month

The index fell from 94.752 in January 2026 to 91.981 in May, despite a small rise in April. May was the lowest monthly figure in the series since January 2016, where this page starts. It then rose for most of the following months: to 95.457 in July, 96.561 in August and, after a dip to 95.693 in September, 98.893 in October. By our arithmetic, October was 7.5% above May and 3.3% above September, and the highest level since January 2025, when the index stood at 99.523. The BLS table records the levels but not the causes.

There is a gap a year earlier. BLS did not collect survey data for October 2025 because of a lapse in appropriations, and the TV series shows no figure for that month. BLS says it therefore cannot publish 12-month percent changes for October 2026 for indexes without October 2025 data. A two-year comparison is still possible: from October 2024 to October 2026, the TV index fell 5.6% and the all-items index rose 6.9%, both by our arithmetic.

Quality changes and what the index leaves out

TVs change from one model year to the next, which makes price comparisons harder. BLS describes hedonic quality adjustment as a way of adjusting prices when the characteristics of products in its sample change because of innovation or new products, by estimating the value of each feature with regression models. A BLS methods page, last modified in 2003, says BLS introduced such a model for TVs with the CPI for January 1999, deducting the estimated value of an improvement from a model's observed price change. Its current quality adjustment methodology list, last modified September 28, 2026, gives “none” as the method for the item Televisions.

The index also leaves a lot out. It follows price changes for the TVs in BLS's sample of urban purchases, not the sticker price of any model, screen size or brand, and it is a national figure. Other video equipment is a separate item in the CPI. For what a spec sheet tells you about a particular set, our guides to TV screen sizes and HDMI 2.1 and eARC go through the figures makers publish.