US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the 12 months to September 2026, up from 2.4% in February. By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' method, energy accounts for virtually all of that rise (99.8%): it added 1.35 percentage points in September, against 0.03 in February. The 2025 shutdown may have understated February's shelter figure; using September 2025 instead, energy's contribution rose while everything else's fell. Everything else added 2.38 points in both months, down from 2.84 a year earlier.
September is the latest month with a 12-month change, released by the BLS on 14 October. Its October figures, released on 10 November, carry no 12-month change for most indexes, including all items, because the 2025 federal government shutdown stopped October 2025 price collection and BLS publishes no 12-month change where October 2025 data are missing. November's figures are due on 10 December.
What these numbers are
The consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) tracks the prices of a fixed basket of goods and services bought by US urban households. The inflation rate here is its change over 12 months, before seasonal adjustment, as the BLS reports it in its headline.
A component's contribution is how many of those percentage points it accounts for. It is not the same as its weight, its share of the basket, which the BLS calls relative importance. Energy (motor fuel, household fuels such as fuel oil, electricity and piped gas) represented 6.4% of the CPI basket in September 2025, the start of this comparison, but accounted for 36.2% of the latest inflation rate, because its prices rose far faster than the rest. Roughly, energy's 6.4% share times its 20.4% price rise gives about 1.3 points, about a third of the 3.7% rate; the exact calculation, which allows for the basket update in January, gives 1.35 points, or 36.2%. The 36.2% share uses unrounded figures. The September 2025 relative importance rests on 2023 expenditure weights, carried forward by price changes since; it is not a measure of current spending.
We follow the BLS's published method: a component's contribution is its relative importance at the start of the 12 months multiplied by its price change. We split each window at its December link month, using the weights that apply to each segment, as the BLS advises when a window crosses a weight update. Expenditure weights changed every two years through 2022 and annually from 2023. The five parts used here add up to the all-items rate: energy; food; other goods (cars, clothing, furniture, medicines and the rest); shelter (rent, the rental value of owner-occupied homes, and hotels and other lodging away from home); and other services (medical care, car insurance, airline fares and the rest).
An energy shock, not a broad one
Energy prices were 20.4% higher in September than a year before, and gasoline 34.2% higher. Gasoline alone went from subtracting 0.17 points from inflation in February to adding 1.09 in September. Between those two months, food and other goods added slightly less, and shelter and other services slightly more. The changes almost cancel out: everything except energy contributed 2.382 points in February and 2.384 in September, both rounding to 2.38. The path in between was not flat: everything except energy rose to 2.70 points in May, when all-items inflation peaked at 4.2%, before falling back.
Measured from a year earlier, energy's role is larger still. In September 2025 inflation was 3.0%, energy added 0.18 points and everything else 2.84. Since then energy's contribution has risen to 1.35 and everything else has fallen to 2.38. In April the US Energy Information Administration attributed the first-quarter jump in crude oil and fuel prices to military action in the Middle East on 28 February and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping. The CPI data shows the price rise, not its cause.
Gasoline represented 3.0% of that September 2025 CPI basket and accounted for 29.2% of the inflation rate. Shelter, the largest item in that basket at 35.4%, accounted for 30.5%: still the single biggest contribution outside energy, but now smaller than energy's. Other goods were 19.3% of the basket and accounted for 3.8% of inflation.
Not a repeat of 2022
Energy was the largest single contributor at the June 2022 peak too, adding 2.95 points when inflation reached 9.1%. But then everything else added 6.11 points, spread across food, other goods, shelter and other services. Today the four non-energy components add 2.38 between them.
From 2023 until this spring, shelter was the largest contributor. Its contribution peaked at 2.68 points in March 2023 and has since fallen to 1.14. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, was 2.6% in September 2026: up from 2.5% in February, down from 3.0% a year earlier.
What this data cannot show
October 2025 is missing. The shutdown prevented October 2025 survey-price collection, so the BLS did not publish most October indexes, including all items; some nonsurvey series, including gasoline, remained available. It carried rents forward, leaving the rent indexes unchanged for October; it said the effect "will resolve in April 2026", when those homes were priced again. Shelter's contribution for the months from November 2025 to March 2026 may therefore be understated. That includes February 2026, the baseline used above: its shelter figure of 1.05 may be too low, and part of shelter's rise since then may be April's catch-up. The September 2025 comparison is not affected and gives the same answer. The same gap is why October 2026's release lacks most 12-month changes.
This data shows which prices rose, not why, and not whether higher fuel costs will later pass into other prices.
How this was made
The data is the BLS consumer price index for all urban consumers, US city average, not seasonally adjusted: monthly index levels for all items and the components shown, from the BLS Public Data API, and the December relative importance tables for 2017 to 2025. BLS data is in the public domain. fetch.mjs downloads both and writes two extracts (index levels, relative importance). calculate.mjs computes every number in this post into statistics.json and the monthly contributions. Two checks guard the method: in every month the five contributions sum to the all-items rate within 0.001 points, and relative importances carried forward from each December reproduce the BLS's own published December tables within 0.001. us-inflation-components-make-charts.mjs builds the charts, and re-running it reproduces them exactly. Sources, hashes and choices: PROVENANCE.md and DATA.md. From the download folder, run:
npm ci
node us-inflation-components-src/calculate.mjs
node us-inflation-components-make-charts.mjs