Did prices rise more under Biden than Trump? We checked the data

Claim: A Facebook graphic authentically showed that the price of some household goods and utilities rose more during U.S. President Joe Biden's administration than during President Donald Trump’s second term. Rating: ContextThe graphic presented an unfair comparison of changes to the inflation rate for 12 household goods and utilities during the Biden and second Trump administrations. The graphic's comparison wasn't accurate because it compared Biden's full 48-month term to only 20 months of Trump's. Additionally, Snopes could not replicate the figures the graphic presented using the database it listed as a source. In September 2026, a Facebook graphic (archived) circulated online that social media users claimed authentically showed that the price of some household goods and utilities rose more during the U.S. President Joe Biden's administration than during President Donald Trump's second term. In other words, social media users claimed the graphic showed that the rate of inflation, meaning the increase in prices over time, was higher during Biden's presidency than during Trump's second term. For example, one Facebook user shared the graphic and wrote, "Inflation hit American families hard under Biden." The graphic also circulated elsewhere on Facebook, including on the page of the Denton County Republican Party in Texas (archived, archived). Social media users on Instagram, Threads and TikTok also shared the post (archived, archived, archived). Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether the numbers on the graphic were real. While the graphics did purport to show that the price of some household goods and utilities rose less during the second Trump administration than during Biden's presidential term, its figures appeared to be false (wrong), fake (fabricated) or both, and the comparison it made wasn't accurate or fair. We could not replicate any of the rate-of-inflation changes the graphic indicated took place between January 2021 and January 2025 or between January 2025 and August 2026 using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) database. Importantly, it's the same database the graphic said it pulled its data from. The graphic also made an unfair comparison by directly comparing Biden's 48-month presidency to the 20 months between January 2025 and August 2026 (both included) of Trump's second term. Because inflation is measured over time, direct comparisons should use time periods of the same length. A "fair" comparison in this case might have compared either the first 20 months of Biden's presidency to the first 20 months of Trump's or Biden's full term to Trump's full first term. The source of the graphic was unclear. We contacted the Denton County Republican Party, which posted an early version of the graphic, to ask where they got their data from and await a reply. It's worth noting that Pangram, a highly regarded artificial intelligence detector for images and text, found two versions of the graphic to be fully AI. Facebook also marked the Denton County Republican Party's posting of the graphic as AI content. (It's important to note that currently, no AI detection tool is regarded as 100% reliable.) It's unclear what the sources of the images we scanned might have used AI for. They could have used AI tools to find or conjure the data or merely to present it. What is the CPI? The graphic listed the BLS' CPI-U database as its source. According to the BLS, the CPI tracks "changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households" — in other words, inflation. CPI-U covers urban consumers, which the BLS says accounts for 90% of the total population of the U.S. Because the CPI tracks price changes over time, it makes the most sense to use the index when comparing one point in time to another. According to the BLS website, most of its index series — meaning a data set that tracks prices for a certain item over time — use an average index from the 36 months covering 1982, 1983, and 1984. The BLS assigns that time period an index of 100, and all later periods show changes compared to that baseline. The BLS wrote: An index of 110, for example, means there has been a 10-percent increase in price since the reference period; similarly, an index of 90 means there has been a 10-percent decrease. Changes to the rate of inflation (what the CPI measures) are usually reported as a percentage. This is because a percentage most accurately reflects how much prices have fallen or risen between two points in time. What the data actually says The Facebook post above claimed that the graphic used index series from the CPI-U database, using "U.S. cities average" to define the area where the BLS collected the data. We found index series for 12 out of the 13 items listed in the Facebook graphic. The BLS doesn't publish an index series for "Natural gas" within its CPI-U database, meaning the figures the Facebook graphic used could not have come from that source. The graphic didn't say whether it used data that was "seasonally adjusted." The BLS said on its website that such an adjustment attempts to remove "the influences of predictable seasonal patterns from time series data." We used seasonally adjusted data in our attempt to recreate the Facebook graphic (except for "baby food and formula," which did not have seasonally adjusted data available). As the Facebook graphic said, we pulled data for "U.S. city average" from the database. The data from the actual BLS CPI-U database showed that, for 12 goods or utilities, prices rose slower during Trump's second term than during Biden's first. However, that was to be expected given Biden's term covered a time period more than twice as long as the initial 20 months of Trump's second term. The actual BLS CPI-U data also differed from the Facebook graphic that the Denton County Republicans posted for every good or service listed. In fact, the Denton County Republicans post short-changed Trump in some places, as the actual data showed inflation had fallen for four of the products listed — not just one, as the graphic claimed. We used the Denton County Republicans post for comparison because the page posted an early version of the graphic. A 'fair' comparison For good measure, here is what a "fair" comparison of the rate of inflation for 12 products during the first 20 months of Biden's presidency and the first 20 months of Trump's second presidency would look like: According to the CPI-U's data for January 2021 to August 2022 and January 2025 to August 2026, the rate of inflation was lower for 10 of the 12 products during the first 20 months of Trump's second term. It's worth noting here that the start of Biden's presidency coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and the highest period of inflation recorded in the U.S. for at least 20 years. Experts disagree about the reason for the high rates of post-COVID inflation. The Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, D.C, wrote in June 2023 that: Most of the rise in inflation in 2021 and 2022 was driven by developments that directly raised prices rather than wages, including sharp increases in global commodity prices and sectoral price spikes driven by a combination of pandemic-induced kinks in supply chains and a huge shift in demand during the pandemic to goods from services. It assigned a smaller role to fiscal policy. Meanwhile, researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management found in July 2024 that 42% of the inflation seen in 2022 "could be attributed to government spending." Federal spending to bolster the economy during the COVID pandemic helped it bounce back but also caused a "surge" in inflation, according to the school's experts. In sum, the Facebook post that circulated online claiming lower rates of inflation for 13 products during Trump's second term than Biden's first appeared to use fabricated data and also presented an unfair comparison. It's unclear whether various creators used AI to source, conjure and/or present the data. For further reading, Snopes has previously investigated other claims about inflation.