§1Prices: BLS producer price indexes
We pull eight series from the BLS Public Data API (unkeyed): WPU084101 (wood pallets and pallet containers), WPU0841 (including wood and metal combination), PCU321920321920 and two of its sub-series (wood container and pallet manufacturing), and WPU081, WPU0811 and WPU0812 (lumber, softwood lumber, hardwood lumber). All are not seasonally adjusted.
We store each value with its series id, month and BLS's preliminary flag, and we show the base period with every level (1982 = 100 for the WPU series, December 2003 = 100 for the PCU series). Monthly and yearly changes are simple percentage changes of the stored values.
BLS marks recent months preliminary and can revise them for up to four months after first publication. We re-pull the full history at each refresh, so revisions replace earlier values.
We don't reproduce Random Lengths or any other proprietary price series.
§2Supply markets: BLS QCEW
State and metro pages use the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages annual averages for NAICS 321920 (wood container and pallet manufacturing) and 321113 (sawmills), private ownership, from the open CSV files BLS publishes by industry. We use 2020 to 2025 for states and 2020 to 2024 for metropolitan statistical areas, because 2025 metro data had not been released when we pulled.
BLS suppresses employment and wages where publishing them would disclose a single employer. We show those as "not disclosed"; we never estimate them. Establishment counts are published even when wages are suppressed.
Metro pages are built only for MSAs with at least 5 pallet establishments in 2024, and are indexed only where BLS disclosed employment in at least one year. The build also compares every pair of state pages and every pair of metro pages, and flags pairs whose figures differ by less than 10% on every metric.
Census County Business Patterns is not used: its API now requires a key, and we use only data we can pull without one.
§3Freight context: EIA diesel
Weekly retail on-highway diesel prices by PADD region come from EIA's published history files. We average the weeks in each month. State pages show the region that EIA's PADD map assigns the state to; California is priced separately.
§4Monthly report notes
The notes on each monthly index report are generated from the published figures by fixed rules, not written by an analyst: the reading and its month and year changes, the highest or lowest reading since an earlier month, the five-year range, the twelve-month gap between the lumber and pallet indexes, the industry-basis index change, and the monthly diesel average. Each note restates a number shown in the tables on the same page. Written commentary is added by an editor when available.
The escalation example on each report applies the full twelve-month index change to a $10.00 price. The review-timing note assumes the model escalator clause: quarterly reviews on the first day of January, April, July and October, using the index for the second month before the quarter.
§5Calculations
Every calculator shows its formula next to the result. The cost models are documented on the Program Builder and the cost-per-trip calculator. No calculator contains vendor prices; you enter your own quotes.
§6Storage and refresh
The pulled data is committed to the site's repository as JSON and loaded into a Cloudflare D1 database that answers the live tools. Pages are rebuilt from the same files. We refresh monthly after BLS releases the PPI, and the stamp on each data block shows the retrieval date.