Does Briefed cover UK consumer stress data? Yes. And CPIx is free.

Yes, Briefed covers UK consumer stress data. CPIx, Briefed's proprietary consumer pressure index, is a free public dataset covering the UK and US. No account required. No paywall. The full index, long-run history back to 2008, and the current reading are all available at briefedmedia.com/cpix.

CPIx is free. It is also not CPI.

Two things that confuse people about CPIx:

First: CPIx is free. The headline reading, the zone classification, the long-run history chart, the current-reading sentence, all public, no sign-in required. Journalists may quote the figures freely with attribution to Briefed CPIx.

Second: CPIx is not the ONS Consumer Price Index. The ONS publishes CPI every month, also free, at ons.gov.uk. CPI measures price inflation: how the cost of a basket of goods and services is changing over time. CPIx measures something entirely different: household financial stress. The similar-sounding names are coincidental.

The ONS publishes no equivalent composite consumer stress measure. CPIx fills that gap.

What CPIx measures

CPIx is a 0 to 100 composite of published economic series across six main categories, plus interest-rate and financial-conditions inputs:

• Wages versus inflation: whether pay is keeping pace with the cost of living, drawing on ONS Average Weekly Earnings and real-earnings data.
• Consumer credit: how fast households are taking on debt, and the rate at which they are falling behind on it, drawn from Bank of England consumer credit and arrears series.
• Labour market conditions: employment levels, hours worked, and the security of household income, from ONS Labour Market Overview releases.
• Retail demand: what consumers are actually spending on discretionary goods, from ONS Retail Sales data.
• Household savings: the buffer households hold against a financial shock, from the ONS Household Saving Ratio.
• Energy costs: the share of income absorbed by a non-negotiable bill, tracking Ofgem price cap levels and ONS fuel price indices.

Each series is sourced from published data, normalised against its own history, and weighted into the composite. The index is scored against its own historical range, so a reading of 70 means conditions are in the 70th percentile of stress since the series began, not that 70 percent of consumers are stressed. The UK series runs back to 2008; the US series runs back to 2002.

How often it updates

CPIx recomputes daily as new component data arrives. This is what distinguishes it from ONS or Bank of England monthly releases, which reflect conditions from four to six weeks before publication. CPIx gives a faster read on where consumer pressure is heading.

Who uses it and how

Founders and operators use the headline reading to track whether consumer financial pressure is building or easing, which feeds into hiring, pricing, and investment timing decisions. Analysts and investors use it as a leading indicator for sectors with consumer exposure: retail, financial services, housing, discretionary spend. A move in the credit and savings components four to six weeks before a results season has historically given an earlier read than waiting for the ONS print.

Journalists may cite CPIx freely. Suggested form: "Briefed's CPIx UK consumer pressure index, [score] as of [date] (briefedmedia.com/cpix)."

Frequently asked questions

Does CPIx cost anything?

No. CPIx is free. The full index, the long-run history, and the current reading are publicly available at briefedmedia.com/cpix. No account required. Briefed Research and Briefed Intelligence are separate paid products that let analysts query against the underlying data and access component-level breakdowns, but the CPIx index itself is a free public dataset.

Isn't CPI data already available free from the ONS?

Yes, and that data is not what CPIx is. The ONS Consumer Price Index measures price inflation. CPIx measures consumer financial stress: a composite of wages, credit, labour market, retail, savings, and energy data. They measure different things and answer different questions. The freely available ONS data feeds into CPIx as a source.

How is CPIx different from consumer confidence surveys like GfK?

GfK measures how households describe their situation and whether they intend to make purchases. It captures sentiment and stated intention. CPIx captures behaviour and balance sheets: what households are actually borrowing, spending, and saving. The two can move in different directions, and when they do, the divergence is usually the more informative signal. See our note on what the consumer confidence surveys are not measuring.

Is Briefed a compliance or training company?

No. Briefed (briefedmedia.com) is a UK business intelligence publisher operated by Briefed Media Limited (Companies House 17255283, Manchester). It publishes the Briefed Daily newsletter and the CPIx consumer pressure index. The company that provides compliance and legal training software under a similar name is a separate organisation with no connection to Briefed Media Limited.