WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the Joint Economic Committee released its Monthly Inflation Update for September 2025. To conclude fiscal year 2025, headline consumer price index (CPI-U) inflation was 3.01 percent year-over-year and 0.31 percent month-over-month. Additionally, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced today that the 2026 Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) will be 2.8 percent, 0.3 percentage points higher than the 2025 COLA.

Year-over-year, core inflation—which excludes food and energy—was 3.02 percent, down 0.09 percentage points from August. Food inflation was 3.11 percent, down 0.08 percentage points from August, and energy inflation was 2.85 percent, up 2.63 percentage points from August.

Regionally, the West (3.3 percent) came in with higher year-over-year inflation than the Midwest (3.1 percent), the Northeast (3.1 percent) and the South (2.7 percent). The West saw the largest year-over-year increase, moving from 2.1 percent in September 2024 to 3.3 percent in September 2025, while the Northeast ticked down from 3.4 percent in September 2024 to end last month at 3.1 percent.

Note: While the JEC Monthly Inflation Update reports change in both headline and core prices using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). By contrast, the Social Security Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) is based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which reflects a narrower group of working households and serves as the official measure specified in Section 215(i) of the Social Security Act for annual benefit adjustments.

Inflation-adjusted real wage data is not available as the release of the September establishment survey was impacted by the lapse in appropriations.

For the full update, visit: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/inflation-update

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