Philly Fed Prices Paid

Philly Fed Prices Paid is the current input price index from the Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey (MBOS) by the Philadelphia Fed since May 1968. It covers manufacturers in Delaware, southern New Jersey, and eastern and central Pennsylvania, known as the Third District. It never measures the whole United States. The live reading is the current index, not the six-month-ahead one.

Owners, CEOs, and plant managers answer one question voluntarily each month: whether input prices rose, held steady, or fell. The panel stays broadly stable but turns over slowly as firms join or leave. The index covers input costs only, not prices charged or consumer inflation. A positive value means rises outweigh falls, a sign of pipeline pressure, but never of how much prices rose.

Responses are emailed to participants and collected over an 8-day period that closes on the Monday before publication. The Philadelphia Fed usually publishes at 8:30 a.m. ET on the third Thursday of each month, barring holidays, and the text file comes first. Dates for the next year are usually posted in November.

Each release reports current diffusion indexes for activity, orders, shipments, backlogs, delivery times, inventories, prices paid, prices received, employment, and workweek. It also gives six-month-ahead indexes plus capital spending, special questions, charts, tables, and downloadable history files. History is revised once a year in January with new seasonal factors, so changes are usually minor and there is no within-month revision.

It has no weighted parts, since one survey question with equal votes forms the index. It is published with independent sibling indexes, each from its own question, and the headline is no average of them.

• General activity: the headline index, tracking the overall level of business activity.
• New orders, shipments, unfilled orders: new demand, goods shipped, and orders awaiting delivery.
• Delivery times, inventories: how fast suppliers deliver and how stocks stand.
• Prices received: prices firms charge their customers.
• Number of employees, average workweek: headcount and average weekly hours.
• Capital expenditures: expected spending, shown only for six months ahead.

In the release of March 17, 2022, the current Prices Paid index climbed 12 points to 81.0, its highest since June 1979. More than 87% reported higher input prices, 6% lower prices, and 7% no change. Prices Received rose only 5 points to 54.4, a margin squeeze as firms absorbed costs.

Headline activity rose 11 points to 27.4, and employment hit 38.9, its highest ever. Expected activity fell 5 points to 22.7. Special questions showed 56% facing supply constraints, with over two-thirds expecting energy-market impacts to worsen.

1. Count shares: tally the shares of firms reporting higher, unchanged, and lower input prices for the month.
2. Seasonal adjustment: correct each share separately with Census X-12 seasonal factors, a fix for normal seasonal swings. Then build the index from the adjusted shares, never the raw ones.
3. Subtract: take the adjusted share reporting rises minus the adjusted share reporting falls. Unchanged answers shape context but leave the formula. The score runs from minus 100 to plus 100, with 0 meaning equal rises and falls.
4. Illustrative example: 40% rises minus 15% falls gives 25.0. For instance, 51.0% adjusted rises minus 9.5% adjusted falls gives 41.5, wide pressure, not a 41.5% price jump.