The US Energy Index is a free, public reference for what energy costs an American household. It's part of Clay Indices, a reference house built on one idea: take a public number, define exactly what it measures, show it plainly, cite the source, and stop.
Energy prices are among the most-watched numbers in American life, and among the most fragmented. Gasoline gets a daily headline, electricity a shrug on the monthly bill, and the household's actual energy burden — the blend of the two plus gas and oil heat — has no single number a reader can follow. The government publishes every ingredient; nobody hands you the dish. The US Energy Index is that dish: four public price series, weighted by the government's own survey of what households spend, blended by a formula short enough to read at a glance.
Present the number; never tell the reader what to conclude. Energy prices attract narratives — every price move is somebody's policy vindication or somebody's crisis. We don't participate. The index says energy cost X% more or less than last year; whether that is good news, bad news, or whose fault it is, is your department. The methodology is versioned, rules-based, and has no discretionary overrides — the number cannot be nudged.
Everything here is free to read and free to reuse with attribution. The index history, every component series, every state's history, and the state ranking all carry CSV downloads. If you cite a figure, cite the source we cite — the BLS for prices and weights, the EIA for the state tables — and you're on solid ground.
The data pipeline and much of the writing are built with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing. The figures in the prose are computed from the same data that feeds the charts, so the words can't drift from the numbers. Where we're unsure, we say so.