Frequently Asked Questions

The Price and Inflation Expectations Survey (PIES) is a quarterly quantitative survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It asks business leaders in the Third District (Delaware, southern New Jersey, and eastern and central Pennsylvania) about expected price changes in the near and long term. PIES has been conducted since the fourth quarter of 2015.

We conduct PIES quarterly. We collect responses in February, May, August, and November through a set of special questions appended to the existing monthly Manufacturing (MBOS) and Nonmanufacturing (NBOS) Business Outlook Surveys.

We release PIES results in the months of February, May, August, and November, following the release of the respective NBOS.

See the release schedule for the current calendar year. We typically post release dates for an upcoming year in November of the current year.

We ask respondents to share the annual percent change with respect to:

• The prices their firm received (for their own goods and services) over the last year.
• The prices their firm expects to receive (for their own goods and services) over the next year.
• Compensation their firm will pay to their employees (wages and benefits) over the next year.
• Their forecast for U.S. inflation over the next year and over the next 10 years.

CEOs, presidents, and senior executives from manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms across the Third Federal Reserve District complete the survey.

The panel of firms that participate in PIES remains largely consistent over time; however, participation in the survey is voluntary, so the group of respondents may vary slightly each quarter.

PIES provides valuable information about how businesses in the Third District expect prices to change in the short and long term. These forward-looking insights offer a real-time view of inflation expectations from the firm perspective. Because the survey captures the perspectives of decision-makers who directly influence pricing and compensation, it helps to inform assessments of inflation dynamics and business conditions.

We present PIES results as trimmed means and medians. First, we merge responses from the MBOS and NBOS respondents into an “all firms” sample. We then remove unusually high (larger than 1,000) or low values (smaller than -1,000), and then remove (or “trim”) the top 5 percent and bottom 5 percent of the sample. The mean and median for a given question are the mean and median of the remaining “all firms” trimmed sample. We calculate simple averages of the “all firms” sample to derive the means of the responses from manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms.

Trimming responses helps ensure that the survey results reflect typical business conditions rather than being skewed by extreme or atypical values. Firms may occasionally report unusually large or small figures due to unique circumstances or data entry errors. Removing these outliers reduces their influence on summary measures, making the reported averages more representative of the broader business population. This approach improves the reliability and interpretability of the results, especially when comparing trends over time or across sectors.

No, we do not seasonally adjust the PIES data. However, because we ask respondents to provide four-quarter (or year-over-over) percent changes, seasonality should not be a factor in firms’ responses.

Although it is still early to draw significant conclusions, initial evidence suggests that the survey results do track U.S. inflation reasonably well. So far, firms’ reported own-price changes in PIES tend to move in line with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index (CPI), showing similar trends during the pandemic and post-pandemic period.

For a more detailed comparison of PIES data to U.S. inflation, refer to Regional Spotlight: Introducing PIES.

Several organizations conduct surveys that offer complementary measures of inflation expectations. The surveys listed below provide publicly available data on inflation expectations from different perspectives:

• The Philadelphia Fed’s Survey of Professional Forecasters gathers forecasts from economists and analysts on a range of macroeconomic variables, including inflation.
• Household expectations are captured by the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers and the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, both of which report short- and longer-term views on inflation.
• For firm-based measures, in addition to PIES, the Cleveland Fed’s Survey of Firm’s Inflation Expectations and the Atlanta Fed’s Business Inflation Expectations survey provide alternative perspectives on how businesses anticipate changes in prices.

These surveys, along with PIES, contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of inflation expectations across different sectors of the economy.