The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will omit some October 2026 12-month inflation readings because a 2025 government shutdown prevented the price collection needed to calculate them.
The agency collected no October 2025 survey prices and issued no Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for that month during a lapse in federal funding from Oct. 1 through Nov. 12, 2025. To fill missing observations, it used the most recent prices it had collected. BLS says that approach can make inflation appear lower when prices generally rise, or higher when they fall.
The gap affects October 2026 indexes without an October 2025 value; BLS says it will not publish their 12-month percentage changes.
An Oct. 19 post on The Big Picture argued that changes to U.S. inflation measures have repeatedly played down price increases. Official reviews document a more varied history. BLS says the Mitchell Committee estimated that a wartime cost-of-living index underestimated inflation by at most 3% to 4% from January 1941 through December 1943, partly because it did not fully reflect declining product quality.
The 1996 Boskin Commission, examining the CPI of its time, estimated that it overstated annual inflation by 1.1 percentage points, within a range of 0.8 to 1.6 points. BLS said evidence was limited for parts of that estimate, particularly those involving new goods and changes in quality.
Some revisions changed how consumer costs are measured. In January 1983, BLS began using estimated rental value to measure owner-occupied housing in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), treating a home’s purchase as an asset transaction rather than a current shelter cost. In 2023, it began updating CPI spending weights annually instead of every two years to better reflect recent purchases.
At the request of the Cost of Living Council, BLS first published a CPI measure excluding food and energy in April 1977. It describes that measure as one of several tools for examining inflation; food and energy remain in the all-items index. From December 1982 through December 2010, the all-items CPI rose at an annualized 2.93%, compared with 2.99% for the measure excluding those categories.
The Federal Reserve switched the inflation measure used to present its forecasts from CPI to the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index in 2000, citing differences in its formula and spending coverage. In 2012, it adopted a 2% longer-run goal measured by overall PCE inflation.
Index choices also affect government adjustments. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act applied the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U) to specified tax-code amounts. Social Security cost-of-living increases continue to use the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).
BLS is scheduled to release October CPI data on Nov. 10, 2026, when it also plans to publish final C-CPI-U estimates for October through December 2025.
