State Street PriceStats: Inflation’s unwelcome encore

Prices in the United States rose more modestly in October, as the impact of higher energy prices faded — but the increase was still enough to lift the annual inflation rate back to its cyclical high.

The State Street PriceStats index rose 0.3 percent in October on a non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis. While smaller than last month’s energy-driven jump, the rise still pushed annual inflation up another 0.2 percentage points to 5 percent, matching the four-year high reached in May this year.

State Street PriceStats enables daily inflation measurement with just a three-day lag, offering timely insights that complement traditional government statistics. It serves as a valuable leading indicator and is especially useful during periods when government releases are delayed or unavailable. Its daily insights are increasingly relevant for policymakers, investors, and analysts seeking to track inflation dynamics in near real time.

Covering over 27 countries and multiple sectors — including food, health, and transportation — State Street PriceStats uses consistent methodologies to ensure its indicators are comparable across geographies, time periods, and official data sources.

October’s 0.3 percent rise in the State Street PriceStats index is an improvement from September’s 0.6 percent jump, but it’s still unwelcome news. The increase is double the monthly rate typically recorded in the month of October. That’s why State Street PriceStats shows the annual inflation rate has once again climbed to 5 percent.

Official data, however, will be a step behind. The annual inflation rate, excluding shelter, jumped above 4 percent in September, but the next release will take longer than usual, as last year’s government shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) from collecting prices for October 2025. As a result, the next official report will include an index level and a month-on-month reading, but no annual rate. When November’s figures are published on December 12, the annual inflation rate is likely to move much closer to May’s inflation peak, as State Street PriceStats already indicates.

The details beneath the headline inflation trend point to broader price pressures this month too. While the rise in energy prices was more modest, food and beverage, household equipment, and electronics prices all posted above-average gains in October, hinting that spillover from higher energy costs into broader inflation, particularly core inflation, is beginning.
 

About the State Street PriceStats indicators

The State Street PriceStats series are designed to provide a low-latency and high-frequency view into inflation trends, comparable to the official consumer price index (CPI). The features of the process are as follows:

• Daily online price collection: State Street PriceStats collects price data daily from over 1,500 multi-line retailers using web scraping technologies, focusing on those with both online and physical stores. Research has shown that retailers tend to adjust online prices first.
• Data structuring and cleaning: Models then clean and standardize raw price data to ensure consistency across more than 40 million products, converting unstructured HTML into structured datasets ready for analysis.
• Categorization and quality checks: State Street PriceStats categorizes prices by economic sectors and sub-sectors, calculates performance statistics, and applies a red-flag system with daily manual checks to resolve data anomalies.
• Index calculation using econometric techniques: State Street PriceStats computes daily inflation statistics using proprietary econometric methods and publishes the results with a three-day lag.
• Retailer and product selection: State Street PriceStats selects retailers based on market share and city presence, and includes over 500,000 daily prices — far exceeding the 80,000 monthly prices used by the BLS.
• Use of CPI weights and no quality adjustments: State Street PriceStats applies official CPI weights where possible and adjusts for online data characteristics, calculating price changes only from consecutive observations of identical products without applying standard quality adjustments.

For more information or to request a demo, visit our State Street PriceStats Solutions page.