Sacramento Grocery Prices in 2026: The Running Report

The grocery basket index

Each month we compare only the products we priced at the same store in both that month and the one before, take the typical change across them, and chain those changes into a running level with February set at 100. The index is now 101.0: groceries are up 1.0% since February.

The index weights every department equally, so it is not a household spending basket: milk counts no more than mustard. It tracks our catalog, not the whole city, so it shows direction and does not replace the CPI. Comparing the same products month over month keeps a change in what we collected from being counted as a change in what things cost.

Category trends month by month

Each panel is one department's price change since February, on the same products. The panels share one scale, and the gray lines behind each one are the other departments. The table underneath gives every month as an index, where 102 means 2% more than in February.

Year-to-date change by category

Each department's change from February to September, measured on products we priced in every month along the way. 12 of 13 departments are up and none are down. The "typical price" column is the plain average of what we recorded in September. It gives a sense of scale and cannot be compared across months, because the mix of items behind it shifts.

Were the sales any good?

The average markdown each month, across every sale price we recorded. A deeper average discount means a better month to stock up.

What is behind these numbers

SacGroceries tracks prices through a mix of automated collection from store websites and community contributions. This page is regenerated from the full price history at the start of each month.

• Period covered: Feb through Sep 2026 (8 months)
• Data points: 2,956,027 price records across 219,107 products at 24 stores
• How changes are measured: matched products only. For each pair of consecutive months we keep the items priced at the same store in both, take the geometric mean of their price ratios, and chain those links into an index. This is the same matched-model approach official price indices use, and it is why the numbers here are smaller than a plain month-to-month average would suggest. That average mostly measures which items we happened to collect.
• Prices used: the price in effect that month, which is the sale price where an item was on sale and the regular price otherwise.
• Category inclusion: a department appears only if at least 300 of its products can be matched across every consecutive month. Currently excluded: Wine, Spirits, Beer, Baby. We track too few of these across months to measure them.
• Excluded: prices under $0.10 or over $100 as likely errors, months with under 5,000 records, the in-progress month, and per-item swings beyond ±50% in a single month (data errors rather than price moves).
• Coverage changes: the number of stores we collect from moves month to month. Matching products across months absorbs most of that, but not all of it.