The BYB Price Index: September 2026 Report

The dataset grew by 45 pages and one department, and the median fell because the new pages sit lower. Prices didn’t drop across the board. The ranges on the pages we already had barely moved as a group; the new pages pulled the middle down.

All 102 of August’s pages are still published. The 45 new to the count are 24 buying guides and gift lineups and 21 head-to-heads. Thirty-three were first published on 14 September, including the 12 that opened a new department, Clothing & Accessories. Most of the 11 new Health & Wellness pages cover supplements, first aid and home health monitors. Six of the eight new gift lineups cap their picks at $50 or less.

The new pages add 187 ranges. One guide lost a range: gaming PCs under $1,000 went from three picks to two on 27 September.

The new pages explain the lower median. August’s 102 pages have a median of $80 to $110 today, close to their $85 to $110 in August. The 45 new pages have a median of $50 to $65. They also hold most of the growth under $50: 87 of the 262, while August’s pages went from 179 to 175. Health & Wellness shows it most. Its median entry price was $130 in August and is $50 now, as supplement and first aid guides joined the gadgets and air purifiers it held before.

Within August’s pages, 474 of the 507 entries still name the same product in the same guide. Of those, 374 carry the same range as in August. The other 100 changed: 67 now sit lower, 31 higher, and 2 widened or narrowed around the same middle.

The remaining 33 entries now carry a different product or model name. Every guide that swapped a pick carries a dated note saying what changed. The largest round was the 23 September price check, which replaced discontinued, renamed and over-limit picks in 45 guides.

This is the first edition with a month to compare against, and the comparison describes our dataset, not the market. A range in our guides changes for one of two reasons. Either the price at the retailer moved, or a re-check found our range was wrong and we corrected it. The figures above don’t separate the two, so we don’t read the 67 lower ranges as prices falling.

For you, the practical reading is simpler. If you’re weighing a pick against a figure in the August report, check the guide itself: each one shows the date its prices were last checked. Every correction that changed what a guide told you is logged with a date on our corrections page.

Every figure in this report comes from the price range published in one of our own buying guides. The ranges are estimates, not quotes. Each is re-checked against current retailer listings in a weekly price check; the latest ran on 5 October 2026. When a number moves, the guide’s range is updated, and the price index is recomputed from the guides rather than maintained by hand.

This report counts one range per guide entry, as the August edition did, so the two compare like for like. The price index counts a different way, on purpose. It lists each product once per department with its most recently checked range, which comes to 572 ranges from the same guides. Both counts are correct; they answer different questions. The full methodology, its limits and how to cite this data are on the price index page. How the checking works, from the second-pass review to the weekly schedule, is documented on how we verify.