How to read the World Bank Pink Sheet

Published 2026-09-05; updated 2026-09-06.

The Pink Sheet is the World Bank’s monthly table of international commodity prices and price indices, covering roughly 70 named benchmark series plus group indices, with monthly figures running back to January 1960. It is published in the first week of each month, released under a CC BY 4.0 license, and it is the backbone of the price series on this site; the edition used here carries a vintage of 2 September 2026.

Its usefulness comes from consistency rather than speed. A trader wanting today’s price looks at an exchange screen. Someone asking what wheat cost in March 1974 against March 2024, on the same definition, in the same currency, has very few alternatives.

What is actually in each row?

Every row is a benchmark: one grade, at one place, on one delivery basis. The series name carries all three. “Coffee, arabica” is short for the other milds grade traded in New York. “Rice, Thai 5%” is milled rice with up to 5% broken grains, quoted free on board Bangkok. “Palm oil” is quoted delivered Northwest Europe, so it includes the freight that the rice quotation excludes. Two rows in the same table can therefore sit on different delivery bases, and comparing them without checking is the commonest error.

Each cell is a monthly average, not a closing price. The underlying assessments are daily, and the Pink Sheet takes the mean across the month’s trading days. That smoothing is why a month in which a market spiked and fell back can look unremarkable in the table, and why a Pink Sheet figure will rarely match a headline quote for a specific date.

The units are fixed per series and stated in the header: dollars per barrel for crude oil, per tonne for grains and metals, per kilogram for coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton and rubber, per troy ounce for gold, and per million British thermal units for gas. They do not change between months, but they do differ between rows, which matters when scanning a column.

Index rows work differently. The group indices, covering energy, agriculture, grains, beverages, metals and minerals, base metals, timber and the total, are rebased so that the 2010 average equals 100. They are trade-weighted composites of the individual series, which means an index can rise while several of its members fall.

Finally, everything in the monthly tables is nominal US dollars: no inflation adjustment, no currency adjustment. The workbook carries separate annual real series, deflated by a manufactures unit value index, and that is the right comparison across decades. The difference is the subject of nominal versus real prices.

Two rows from the same table, one a price and one an index, with the three things worth checking before quoting either.

A worked example

Read the August 2026 column across the group indices, all on a 2010 equals 100 base (World Bank Pink Sheet). The total index stood at 121.8. Energy was 118.4, grains 119.4, oils and meals 119.3, other food 118.8. Base metals excluding iron ore stood at 164.8, metals and minerals at 146.2, beverages at 176.3, other raw materials at 97.9 and timber at 82.7.

Two things jump out. First, the spread is enormous: beverages sat more than twice as high as timber in the same month, on the same base year. A single “commodity prices” headline built on the total index would have concealed that. Second, the total index of 121.8 is nominal, so a reading 21.8% above the 2010 average does not mean the basket became 21.8% dearer in real terms; between 2010 and 2026 the deflator matters more than the price change for several of these groups.

Now read a single price row. Arabica coffee was quoted at $7.97 per kilogram in August 2026 and $7.91 in July 2026, so the monthly average rose 0.8%. Against August 2025, when the series stood at $8.08 per kilogram, it was 1.4% lower. Both statements are true and they point in opposite directions, which is why a stated comparison window belongs in every sentence about a price change. The full series is on the coffee price page, and the growing regions behind it are on the coffee commodity page.

Four traps worth avoiding

The monthly average hides intra-month extremes: cocoa averaged $10.75 per kilogram in January 2025, its highest monthly figure in the series, but no single trade need have happened at that number. The nominal basis flatters the present: sugar averaged $1.24 per kilogram in November 1974, which the same workbook puts at $7.55 per kilogram in 2024 dollars, far above the $0.38 per kilogram of August 2026. The index base year is arbitrary, so an index of 82.7 is not “cheap”, only cheaper than 2010. And a benchmark is not a local price: a farm gate in Uganda and a spot price in New York differ by transport, taxes and margin, which is why the Pink Sheet answers what the world market paid, not what a grower received.

Cite as: Commodity Origins, "How to read the World Bank Pink Sheet", https://commodityorigins.com/learn/how-to-read-the-pink-sheet/ (CC BY 4.0).