The Bureau of Labor Statistics is slated to publish September inflation data on Friday morning, in spite of a government shutdown that has paralyzed federal reporting and has no end in sight.
The Consumer Price Index for September will be released at precisely 8:30 a.m. ET and will mark the first time a major economic report has been issued since the shutdown began Oct. 1.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones and Bloomberg expect the overall annual inflation rate to rise to 3.1% for the 12 months ending in September.
Month over month, that would be the same stubborn pace that has persisted for more than two years. An inflation rate north of 3% is also significantly higher than the Federal Reserve’s target annual rate of 2%.
Earnings have also continued to climb along with prices, hitting a new post-pandemic high in the second quarter of this year.
But for consumers, higher wages on paper do not appear to have eased the sting of rising prices, according to several recent surveys.
Prices and inflation edged out tariffs to become consumers’ most reported concerns in the Conference Board research group’s September survey. The University of Michigan’s closely watched surveys found overall consumer sentiment in October was down 22% from the same month a year ago.
On Wall Street and Main Street, the Trump administration’s global trade and tariffs policy continues to loom large.
“We continue to expect tariffs to remain a source of goods price inflation over the next few quarters,” economists with Bank of America wrote in a client note earlier this week. They also predicted that a decline in used-car prices would dent the overall pace of inflation that shows up in Friday’s report.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote that they expect “an acceleration in headline inflation, largely driven by higher seasonally adjusted gasoline prices.” They also anticipate that “food inflation will remain elevated,” according to a client note.
Whatever the CPI data reveals, many analysts expect it to have an outsized impact on U.S. markets because it lands in the middle of a weeks long blackout on government economic data.
It also arrives less than a week before the Fed’s policy meeting Oct. 28-29. There, committee members will discuss whether to lower interest rates again, which they are widely expected to do. The latest CPI data will help to inform the Fed’s assessment of the U.S. economy.
It will also prove a key factor in determining the Social Security Administration’s annual cost-of-living adjustment for 2026, known as the COLA. Inflation data from July, August and September specifically are used as benchmarks to help set the COLA for the coming year.
Like the CPI data, the Social Security Administration had initially planned to release the 2026 COLA in mid-October, but it was delayed by the government shutdown.
