Between 1978 and 2025, the consumer price index for men’s shoes rose 97.3%, while the index for all items rose 393.5%. In plain terms, a basket of everything Americans buy costs almost five times what it did in 1978, but a comparable pair of men’s shoes costs about twice as much. Women’s shoes rose 62.6% over the same years, and boys’ and girls’ shoes rose 109.8%. All figures compare annual averages of Bureau of Labor Statistics indexes, as published when we pulled them on October 23, 2026.
The gap in numbers
| Index (BLS CPI) | 1978 to 2025 | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Men’s shoes | +97.3% | 1.46% |
| Women’s shoes | +62.6% | 1.04% |
| Boys’ and girls’ shoes | +109.8% | 1.59% |
| All items | +393.5% | 3.45% |
Another way to see it is the “real” price, which divides the shoe index by the all-items index. Set 1978 to 100 and the real price of men’s shoes stood at 40.0 in 2025, meaning shoes lost 60% of their price relative to everything else. Women’s shoes fell to 32.9 and boys’ and girls’ shoes to 42.5. We chart that real price for every year on shoes against overall inflation.
The pattern is steady, not the result of one odd decade. In the 47 years from 1979 to 2025, the men’s shoe index rose faster than all items in only 7 years, and the women’s index in only 5. Men’s shoe prices fell outright in 14 of those years and women’s in 16.
Shoes moved with clothing
Footwear did not behave like rent or medical care. It behaved like clothing. A BLS Spotlight on Statistics feature from June 2012 states that prices for footwear followed a similar pattern as apparel from 1978 to 2004, and that footwear prices have increased somewhat more rapidly since 2004.
Our data match that description. From 1978 to 2004 the all-footwear index rose 50.9% and the apparel index 48.0%, while all items rose 189.6%. From 2004 to 2025 footwear rose 22.2% and apparel 9.0%, against 70.4% for all items. The shoes vs. clothing page shows the two lines side by side. Whatever held shoe prices down appears to have held clothing prices down as well, which points to causes the two industries share rather than something specific to shoes.
What the record documents about production
The same BLS feature reports two facts about U.S. footwear factories between 1987 and 2010:
- Domestic output collapsed. BLS writes that real output in U.S. textile, apparel and footwear manufacturing declined substantially over 1987 to 2010. In its table, the footwear output index falls from 100.0 in 1987 to 25.3 in 2010, so U.S. factories made about a quarter as much footwear at the end of that period as at the start.
- The remaining plants got more efficient. Labor productivity, or output per hour worked, nearly doubled in footwear manufacturing, rising from 100.0 to 185.6 on the same index.
A drop that large in domestic output implies that a growing share of the shoes sold here was made abroad. BLS does not state an import share on that page, and we have not found a current share in a source we could open, so we do not give one here. What the BLS data do let us measure is how the price of imported shoes changed.
Imported shoes got only a little more expensive
BLS also publishes an import price index for footwear. Two details from the BLS import price FAQ matter here. The index measures the change over time in the prices of goods purchased from abroad by U.S. residents, and the prices used to calculate it exclude duties. BLS adds that most import prices are quoted “FOB (Free On Board) Foreign Port,” that is, at the port of export.
From 2000 to 2025, the import price index for footwear rose 21.2%, and the index for imported leather-upper footwear rose 29.2%. Over the same years, the all-items CPI rose 87.0% and the all-footwear CPI 17.7%. The retail shoe index ended up much closer to the price of imported shoes than to general inflation. The monthly record is on our import price tracker for shoes.
This is a match in the numbers, not proof of cause. The import index leaves out duties and shipping, and the store price also includes wages, rent and margins in the United States. Still, a retail index that rose about as fast as the price of the goods coming off the boat is consistent with the documented shift away from domestic production.
U.S. factory prices tell a different story
The producer price index (PPI) follows what U.S. shoe factories charge. On its program page BLS describes it as measuring the average change over time in the selling prices received by domestic producers for their output. From 2000 to 2025, the PPI for footwear rose 79.9%, close to the 87.0% rise in all consumer prices. The PPI for men’s footwear excluding athletic rose 94.8%.
So shoes made in the United States did not get cheaper relative to other goods. The domestic factory-gate price roughly kept pace with inflation, while the consumer shoe index and the import price index both rose far less. The consumer index followed the cheaper of the two price paths. Every month of that PPI since 1947 is listed under U.S. factory shoe prices.
How the CPI method shapes the result
Part of the gap comes from what the CPI is designed to measure. Per the BLS Handbook of Methods, the CPI handles item replacements with quality adjustment as often as possible, and it lists apparel among the areas where class-mean imputation is used for replacements that cannot be directly compared. In practice, when a sampled pair is replaced by a different one, BLS tries to count only the price change for the same quality, not the jump caused by a better or worse product.
That means the index does not tell you what Americans spent per pair. If people buy more expensive athletic shoes today than they bought dress shoes in 1978, average spending per pair can rise while the constant-quality index stays low. The CPI answers a narrower question, how much more a comparable pair costs.
What we cannot say
Several explanations circulate for cheap shoes, such as wage differences abroad, changes in materials, competition among retailers or trade policy. We have not found an opened primary source that measures the size of each effect on the shoe CPI, so we do not rank them. Tariffs are a separate case for this data, since a change in a duty would not show up in the import price index, which excludes duties.
What the BLS record does show fits together. Domestic output fell to about a quarter of its 1987 level by 2010, the price of imported shoes rose slowly after 2000, and the consumer shoe index tracked the import price far more closely than it tracked U.S. factory prices or general inflation. Children’s shoes rose the most of the three groups; their own record is under kids’ shoe prices.