Children’s shoes have become more expensive faster than adult shoes over the long run, yet in 2025 they were the only one of the three footwear groups whose yearly average price went down. Both facts come from the boys’ and girls’ footwear index that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes every month as part of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the government measure of what households pay for goods and services. This page walks through that index with the back-to-school months in mind.
How kids’ shoes sit inside the CPI
The CPI splits footwear into three published indexes, one for men, one for women and one labeled boys’ and girls’. Underneath them, BLS prices four basic items, which it calls entry level items. On its quality adjustment page, boys’ footwear carries code AE021 and girls’ footwear AE022, listed next to the adult items AE011 (men) and AE031 (women). So boys’ and girls’ shoes are sampled as separate items, then combined into one index you can follow.
Each index carries a weight, the share of consumer spending it stands for. In the December 2025 BLS relative importance table, boys’ and girls’ footwear has a weight of 0.124% of the all-items CPI for urban consumers (CPI-U). Men’s footwear is 0.191% and women’s footwear 0.269%. For the narrower index of urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W), the kids’ weight rises to 0.171%, which tells you that working households put a larger part of their budget into children’s shoes than the average urban household does.
Family spending figures point the same way. The BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys, as republished on FRED, show married couples with children spending $670 on footwear in 2019, $528 in 2020 and $737 in 2023, then $683 in 2024. Those are dollars spent, not prices, so they mix price changes with how many pairs families bought.
The long-run trend against adult shoes
Every CPI footwear index uses 1982–84 as its base period, equal to 100. Here is how the annual averages moved, taken from the BLS series our site reads every night.
| Period | Boys’ and girls’ | Men’s | Women’s |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 to 2025 | +109.8% | +97.3% | +62.6% |
| 2000 to 2025 | +32.5% | +16.9% | +11.1% |
| 2015 to 2025 | +8.4% | +9.7% | +3.1% |
| 2024 to 2025 | −1.5% | −0.2% | +0.7% |
Over almost five decades, the kids’ index rose more than either adult index. By 2025 it averaged 163.4, against 151.3 for men’s shoes and 132.9 for women’s. Since all three began at 100 in the 1980s, that gap is a real difference in how prices grew, not just a difference in starting points. You can see the full year-by-year lines on our kids versus adults comparison.
Still, children’s shoes trailed general inflation by a wide margin. All items in the CPI rose 393.5% from 1978 to 2025. If you divide the kids’ shoe index by the all-items index, the inflation-adjusted price of children’s footwear fell 57.5% over the same period. A pair of kids’ shoes takes a much smaller bite out of a household budget than it did in 1978, even though the sticker price roughly doubled.
The largest yearly jumps for kids’ shoes were 1980 (+10.5%), 1979 (+8.1%) and 2022 (+5.8%). The steepest falls came in 2002 (−3.6%), 2000 (−3.5%) and 2020 (−3.0%). In 13 of the 47 years since 1979, the yearly average went down.
If you have an old receipt, our calculator scales it by this index. A $40 pair of kids’ shoes bought in 2000 works out to $54.43 in September 2026 terms on the boys’ and girls’ index, against $78.27 if you used the all-items CPI instead. The boys’ and girls’ shoe page runs the same math for any year since 1978.
What the calendar shows for July, August and September
Our cheapest month page estimates a seasonal pattern by comparing each month’s unadjusted index with its centered 12-month moving average, then averaging that gap for each calendar month over 2015–2025. For boys’ and girls’ shoes the result looks like this:
- June, 0.93% below the yearly trend
- July, 1.00% below
- August, 0.21% below
- September, 0.72% above
- October, 1.75% above (the high point)
- January, 1.45% below (the low point)
From the January low to the October high the spread is 3.2 points, wider than the 2.84-point spread for all footwear. We do not use the BLS seasonally adjusted series for this, because BLS reviews each series every January and adjusts only those with a significant seasonal pattern, and since January 2019 the adjusted kids’ series has carried the same values as the unadjusted one.
A second cut of the same data points the same way. Average month-to-month moves in the unadjusted index over 2015–2025 were June −1.01%, July +0.07%, August +0.94%, September +1.02% and October +1.10%.
Read together, the numbers put the average gap between July and October at about 2.75 points. Kids’ shoe prices in the CPI tend to sit lower in early summer and climb through August and September, reaching their high in October. This is a national average across many outlets, so it says nothing about any single chain’s promotions.
A single year can break the pattern. In 2026 the unadjusted index fell from 169.341 in June to 163.295 in August (−3.6%), then rose 2.7% to 167.708 in September. Treat the averages as a tendency, not a forecast.
Why kids’ shoes behave differently in the index
Three features set this index apart from the adult ones.
Separate boys’ and girls’ items. Because BLS prices boys’ and girls’ shoes as two entry level items, the published index blends two samples. The men’s and women’s indexes each rest on a single item.
A late-year peak. The CPI does not measure how often you buy, only what a comparable pair costs. On that measure, the kids’ index peaks in October like the women’s index (spread 3.44 points), while the men’s index has a narrower swing of 2.61 points and peaks in February.
Quality adjustment applies here too. The BLS quality adjustment list includes boys’ footwear and girls’ footwear among the items that get hedonic adjustment, a statistical method that separates a price change from a change in features (for example, a different upper material) when one shoe replaces another in the sample. That keeps a style change from being counted as pure inflation. Our method page explains how the site reads these indexes.
What the latest month shows
As of September 2026, the boys’ and girls’ index stood at 167.708, up 0.4% from September 2025. Over the same 12 months men’s shoes rose 4.5%, women’s 3.9% and all items 3.7%. After a 5.8% jump in 2022, kids’ footwear prices have been close to flat for three years, while adult shoes have started rising again.
The index cannot tell you what a specific pair will cost at a specific store. What it does tell you is how prices for a fixed, quality-adjusted basket of children’s shoes have moved, and when in the year they tend to be higher.