Texans are paying more for ordinary things — a tank of gas, a full cart, a backpack of school supplies. Texas Price Check exists to say how much more, where the increase is coming from, and what a household can actually do about it this month.
A collaboration of nonprofit organizations · Free to read · No ads, no affiliate linksTwo pressures are working on Texas household budgets at the same time, and they arrive from opposite directions.
Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods, and that cost reaches the shelf on a delay — weeks or months after it's paid at the port. It lands on appliances, on clothing and shoes, on furniture, and on the parts inside a great many things that aren't imported themselves. Some of it gets absorbed along the way. Some of it gets passed to the person at the register. The share that gets passed on is what you feel when the same cart rings up higher than it did last month.
Conflict involving Iran moves the price of crude oil, and crude is what sets the price at the pump. Texas usually pays less than the rest of the country — Gulf Coast refining capacity and one of the lower state fuel taxes see to that — but the direction still follows the world price. And gas doesn't stop at the pump: it moves freight, and freight moves the cost of nearly everything that gets trucked into a Texas store.
Neither of those is something a family can negotiate with. What a family can do is see the numbers plainly, know which way they're heading, and time the spending it can control. That is the whole job of this site.
We're careful about one thing here. We tell you the mechanism — what tariffs do to landed cost, what crude does to a gallon — because that's how prices work and you deserve to understand it. We don't tell you whose fault it is. That part isn't our business, and there are plenty of other places to read it.
Six commitments. They're the reason this site can be short and still be useful.
Every figure on the board says where it came from and what period it covers — BLS, EIA, USDA, Zillow, Texas A&M. Nothing is an estimate unless we label it one, and you can check any of it yourself. The methodology page lists every series.
Gas prices refresh weekly. Everything else updates within days of each monthly federal release. The date on the page is the date of the data, not the date we last touched the site.
When something gets cheaper, it gets the same treatment as when it gets more expensive. Coffee coming down is news too. We color figures by direction, not by opinion.
If we publish a wrong number, we fix it and say that we did. Every proposed change to a figure is read by a person before it reaches this site — no number publishes itself.
A statewide average hides a lot. Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and the Rio Grande Valley each get their own page, because a gallon and a lease don't cost the same across 268,000 square miles.
The Spanish edition carries the same figures from the same sources on the same schedule — not a summary, and not an afterthought. Se habla español.
Prices are seasonal, and so is a shopping list. We follow the calendar Texas households actually shop, and point at the savings that are real that month — not a wall of coupons that expire before you read them.
Texas Price Check is built and paid for by a group of nonprofit organizations that share one belief: households make better decisions when the numbers are in front of them, in plain language, with nobody selling anything. Listed alphabetically — this is a partnership, not a ranking.
We report prices, not politics. This site contains no candidates, parties, or officeholders — only what things cost, why, and what you can do about it. We show prices moving in both directions, over honest timeframes, from sources you can check yourself. If we get a number wrong, we correct it and say we did.
A wrong figure on this page is worth interrupting someone over, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it up. Corrections, questions, and organizations we should know about: contact@kitchentablenews.org.