Markets
October CPI Arrives Tuesday Without an Annual Inflation Rate
The October CPI report on November 10 will show no 12-month rate for headline or core prices, because the BLS collected no prices in October 2025.
The most watched inflation number of the month will be missing its most quoted figure. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes October's consumer price index at 8:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, November 10, it will not publish a 12-month change for all items, for core prices, for food, for energy or for rent. The reason is a year old: the government shutdown from October 1 to November 12, 2025 stopped the agency from collecting prices that October, so there is no base month to compare with. The tables will show dashes in those cells.
What will be published is the change from September to October, seasonally adjusted and not, plus 12-month rates for the few series that have an October 2025 value, such as gasoline, new vehicles and used cars and trucks. That puts all the weight on the monthly figures. Forecasts sit between about 0.2% and 0.3% for both headline and core: FactSet's consensus for the headline is about 0.24%, RBC Economics expects 0.3% for both, and the Cleveland Fed's nowcast on November 6 was 0.24% for the headline and 0.21% for core.
September set a high bar. Headline prices rose 0.6% that month and 3.7% from a year earlier, up from 3.4% in August, with gasoline up 9.1% in the month and responsible for more than half of the increase; core prices rose 0.3% and 2.6% over the year. Pump prices averaged about $4.31 a gallon in October, roughly 1% below September, so energy should subtract from the headline this time. The Cleveland Fed's model puts the implied annual headline rate at about 3.74%, close to where it was.
Markets will do the annual arithmetic themselves. Some analysts will use an average of the September and November 2025 index levels as a stand-in for the missing month; StockTitan's version of that calculation gives about 3.8% for headline and 2.6% for core if October prices were flat. Expect several competing 'annual rates' in headlines on Tuesday morning, none of them official, and treat the monthly change as the number that matters.
The stakes are a December rate hike. After October's payrolls rose 165,000, futures priced roughly a 77% to 80% chance that the Fed raises rates at its December 8 to 9 meeting. Morningstar noted that a softer reading is unlikely on its own to change that view. A core print of 0.3% or more, on top of 3.1% annual wage growth, would leave the committee little reason to wait; producer prices follow on Friday, and the November CPI arrives on December 10, the day after the decision.