Why October Has No 12-Month Inflation Rate This Year

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) could not collect survey data for the October 2025 Consumer Price Index (CPI) during the 2025 lapse in appropriations, which ran from Oct. 1 through Nov. 12, 2025 ^[1]. For most CPI series, BLS “could not publish October 2025 indexes,” and so it “will not publish 12-month percent changes for October 2026 for indexes where October 2025 data are not available” ^[1]. The overall CPI and the core index, which leaves out food and energy, fall under that rule: BLS published neither for October 2025 ^[2].

BLS is scheduled to release the October 2026 CPI at 8:30 AM Eastern on Nov. 10, 2026 ^[3][4]. Its latest published 12-month change for the overall CPI is for September 2026, when “the all items index increased 3.7 percent before seasonal adjustment” ^[3]. BLS did publish an all-items index for November 2025 ^[5], so the overall CPI has a year-earlier month again in the November 2026 release, scheduled for Dec. 10, 2026 ^[4].

All itemsCore (less food and energy)

• Months with no published figure

Data table

date	All items	Core (less food and energy)
2023-01-01	6.33	5.54
2023-02-01	5.96	5.5
2023-03-01	4.92	5.57
2023-04-01	4.95	5.51
2023-05-01	4.13	5.34
2023-06-01	3.07	4.85
2023-07-01	3.29	4.7
2023-08-01	3.72	4.4
2023-09-01	3.69	4.13
2023-10-01	3.25	4.03
2023-11-01	3.13	4.02
2023-12-01	3.32	3.92
2024-01-01	3.09	3.86
2024-02-01	3.16	3.76
2024-03-01	3.49	3.82
2024-04-01	3.36	3.63
2024-05-01	3.24	3.39
2024-06-01	2.97	3.27
2024-07-01	2.94	3.23
2024-08-01	2.61	3.29
2024-09-01	2.43	3.28
2024-10-01	2.58	3.3
2024-11-01	2.72	3.29
2024-12-01	2.87	3.21
2025-01-01	2.99	3.28
2025-02-01	2.8	3.14
2025-03-01	2.38	2.81
2025-04-01	2.33	2.78
2025-05-01	2.38	2.77
2025-06-01	2.68	2.91
2025-07-01	2.74	3.05
2025-08-01	2.94	3.11
2025-09-01	3.02	3.02
2025-10-01	not published	not published
2025-11-01	2.7	2.6
2025-12-01	2.65	2.65
2026-01-01	2.39	2.51
2026-02-01	2.43	2.47
2026-03-01	3.29	2.6
2026-04-01	3.78	2.74
2026-05-01	4.17	2.82
2026-06-01	3.46	2.57
2026-07-01	3.3	2.47
2026-08-01	3.35	2.45
2026-09-01	3.72	2.57

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. CPIAUCSL, CPILFESL, CUSR0000SAF11 · retrieved Nov. 9, 2026 · 320 rows · as of September 2026 · monthly. The chart and data table start with January 2023; the CSV download is the full file, from January 2000. Download CSV

The missing month

BLS says “Most CPI operations, including data collection, were suspended” during the lapse, though it recalled some staff to produce the September 2025 CPI, released Oct. 24, 2025 ^[1].

“Survey data for commodities and services were carried forward to October 2025 from September 2025,” and rents were carried forward from April 2025, which left the rent and owners’ equivalent rent indexes unchanged for October ^[1]. BLS published October 2025 values for a few indexes built from nonsurvey data, with its November 2025 release ^[1].

BLS canceled the October 2025 CPI release, which had been scheduled for Nov. 13, 2025 ^[2]. Its November 2025 release, on Dec. 18, 2025, reported that the CPI for All Urban Consumers “increased 0.2 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis over the 2 months from September 2025 to November 2025” ^[5]. The release lists the one-month changes for October and November 2025 as not available ^[5].

Carrying prices forward

In its shutdown FAQ, BLS says it “viewed retroactively collecting data for October as both costly and potentially inaccurate, especially since the CPI surveys are not based on respondent recall” ^[1]. With no October survey data at all, the “like-kind” imputation methods “could not execute, so imputation resolved to the carry-forward method for all survey samples, including rent” ^[1].

BLS also says it “did not want to intervene and superimpose last minute, unvetted judgment into the process, as this could have been perceived as manipulating the data unscientifically” ^[1]. A change of method that large, it adds, “would require publication in the Federal Register and a public comment period prior to adoption” ^[1].

BLS names a cost of the method: “In periods of general price increases, the carry-forward method may result in an underestimation” ^[1].

For housing, a BLS research article tested four alternative approaches to October 2025 rents (five research indexes), whose one-month changes that month ran above the published, unchanged indexes by 0.24 to 0.53 percentage points for rent and 0.27 to 0.59 points for owners’ equivalent rent ^[7]. The article finds that the research and published indexes “all returned to the same general index level in April 2026” and gives no estimate of the effect on the overall CPI ^[7].

Other measures

A change from September to October 2026 compares two months of 2026, so the 12-month rule does not reach it.

For contracts that call for an index value in a month with no data, a BLS fact sheet describes an approximation that can be used if all parties agree ^[9]. The approximation multiplies the index values for the months before and after and takes “the square root of that product” ^[9]. The same fact sheet warns that “Percent changes based on approximated data should also be considered as unofficial estimates” ^[9], and we computed no October 2026 rate from such an estimate.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes a separate measure, the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), and BEA did publish a PCE price index for October 2025 ^[6]. BEA explains its method: “To replace the missing CPIs, BEA derived seasonally adjusted price indexes for October using the geometric mean of the September and November CPIs” ^[6]. BEA’s October 2026 figures are scheduled for 8:30 AM on Nov. 25, 2026 ^[8], and their 12-month change will compare with an October 2025 index that BEA first estimated in part from those derived CPIs ^[6].

Social Security and annual averages

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment measures prices over a “base quarter,” which the law defines as “the calendar quarter ending on September 30,” averaging “the 3 months in such quarter” ^[10]. October falls outside that quarter, so the missing October 2025 index does not enter the annual adjustment ^[10].

For monthly series with no October 2025 index, BLS says the 2025 annual average “will be computed as the average of the 11 index values published” ^[1].

As of Nov. 9, 2026, BLS had last modified its shutdown FAQ on Sept. 16, 2026, and the page says BLS will update it “as more information becomes available” ^[1].

How we calculated this

The chart’s 12-month changes come from the seasonally adjusted all-items and core indexes on FRED ^[11][12]: each month’s index divided by the index 12 months earlier, minus 1, times 100, rounded to two decimals. BLS figures its headline 12-month change from the index before seasonal adjustment and rounds it to one decimal ^[3], so the two can differ slightly. For September 2026 the chart shows 3.72%, from the seasonally adjusted index ^[11], and BLS published 3.7%, from the index before seasonal adjustment ^[3].