A whole month is missing: October 2025 stays blank in the price index

What survived is telling. There are October figures for gasoline and new cars. Those are items whose prices can be drawn from ongoing data sources, without anyone walking through a store with a clipboard.

Everything that needs fieldwork is missing. And fieldwork is the core of this index. The biggest single item in the American basket is housing, and it is measured through surveys. The second biggest, the one every household feels daily, is food, and that is read off the shelf in the store.

So for October we have numbers on gas and cars, and none on rent and food. In a country where 670 people a month search for grocery prices on our site alone, that is a remarkable state of affairs.

In the United States, the Consumer Price Index is not just a statistic. It is a switch with a great deal of money attached.

It adjusts benefits. The annual increase in government pensions is calculated from a version of this index. Millions of people get more or less money depending on how it comes out.

It drives the tax code. Tax brackets, the standard deduction and many allowances are adjusted for inflation every year. Here too, the index is the basis.

It is written into contracts. In America, commercial leases, long-term supply contracts and labor agreements very often include clauses that tie adjustments to the Consumer Price Index. If a month's value is missing, the contract has to say what applies instead. Most contracts say nothing about it.

And it is the foundation of monetary policy. The central bank sets interest rates based on data. A gap in the series means it decides on the rate for your mortgage with one month less knowledge.

In practical terms, not much at first. Your groceries cost what they cost, whether anyone measures them or not. Indirectly, though, it is a good moment to ask yourself an honest question that many people ask too late when they emigrate: what does this life actually cost?

And the answer is one most Europeans do not like. The United States is not across the board cheaper than home, and not across the board more expensive. It is expensive in different ways, and the differences are so big that any comparison without a location and a lifestyle is worthless.

As a rule, these are cheaper than in most of Europe: gasoline, cars, electronics, meat, restaurant prices relative to portion size, large homes outside the big metros, and many everyday services.

More expensive, often dramatically so: health insurance, childcare, private schooling, college, rents in the big coastal cities, tradespeople, and anything to do with healthcare.

So the difference is less about the level and more about the structure. At home you pay a lot through taxes and contributions and get services in return. In America you pay less in taxes and buy those same services one by one, at market prices. If you only look at the tax rate instead of running the numbers, you will get it wrong every time.

Take a sheet of paper and write down four numbers for the place you are moving to.

Rent or mortgage plus property tax. Property tax is the item Europeans routinely forget, and in Texas or New Jersey it can run to several hundred dollars a month.

Health insurance for the whole family. Not the base premium, but the realistic annual cost including the deductible. Go in with European expectations and you will be off by a factor of three.

Childcare or school. Public schools are free, and their quality depends on the school district, which means on where you live, which means on your rent. In America, these three cannot be separated.

Getting around. Outside a handful of cities, two cars are not a choice but a necessity. The upside: gas is cheap.

If you want to understand the healthcare side on its own, see Health insurance and healthcare.

It sounds paradoxical, but the fuss over one missing monthly figure is a compliment to this country. You only notice a missing statistic when you can normally rely on it.

The US statistics agency is one of the few institutions whose numbers are largely beyond political dispute. It collects, it publishes, it revises transparently. And in this case it did exactly what you expect from a serious agency: it did not estimate the missing month, did not interpolate it, did not fill it with a placeholder. It left it blank.

That is the right call, and it is more uncomfortable than any estimate. A blank field tells the truth: we do not know.

The Consumer Price Index is not the only series hit by the shutdown. The jobs numbers, which normally come out on the first Friday of every month and move markets worldwide, are affected too.

If you are emigrating, that is more than a footnote, because the jobs numbers are the only reliable guide to how easily you can actually find staff in a given industry and region. Anyone planning to hire in America next spring is working with an incomplete picture right now.

There is a practical way around it, and it is typically American: ask the private sector. Payroll providers, job boards and recruiters publish their own numbers, which are not official, but they exist. In a country where the government can shut down, a private substitute has grown up for almost every public data source.

We see three mistakes again and again, and all three cost money.

The sticker price mistake. In America, the price on the shelf is before tax. Sales tax is added at the register, anywhere from zero to over ten percent depending on the state and city. Coming from Europe and comparing prices in your head, you will always get it wrong, because you are holding a European price with VAT included against an American price without tax.

The tipping mistake. What is a gesture back home is part of the wage here. Between 18 and 22 percent in a restaurant is the norm, not the exception. Leave it out and you will underestimate your spending on eating out by a fifth.

The take-home pay mistake. American gross salaries look spectacular. Out of them come federal tax, state tax in many states, payroll taxes and, the big one, the employee share of health insurance. Hold a European net salary against an American gross salary and your math is fundamentally off.

So always calculate in disposable income after taxes, after insurance and after housing. It is the only number that tells you anything, and for the same person it comes out completely differently in Austin, Miami and San Francisco.

If you sign a long-term contract with an index clause in the United States, such as a commercial lease, a multi-year supply contract or a compensation agreement with adjustments, it now needs one more sentence: what applies if the relevant index is not published for a given period?

The usual fixes are simple. Use the last published value, use a substitute index, or use the average of the surrounding months. What matters is not which option you pick, but that you pick one.

It is one sentence. It costs nothing when you draft the contract. And it prevents a dispute that will play out thousands of times in America this year.

And if you are setting up a company anyway, take the thought with you: the contracts of your American company, with landlords, suppliers and employees, are contracts in a country whose statistics can go dark. That is no reason to worry, but it is a reason to think two minutes longer when drafting them.

If you have a contract like this in front of you, or want to work out your cost of living for a specific place, talk to Mount Bonnell Advisors in Austin, Texas.

Emigrating means making a decision under uncertainty. You do not know the exchange rates for the next ten years, how rents will move where you are going, or how your own health will hold up. Numbers help you put that uncertainty in order, but they do not make it go away.

In that sense, the missing October is a useful prompt to check your own plan. If your move depends on inflation staying within a certain range, the dollar holding at a certain rate or a rent not going up, that is not a plan. It is a bet.

A solid plan looks different. It can handle everyday costs twenty percent higher, an exchange rate ten percent worse and a year without the income you were counting on. Plan like that and you will rarely be disappointed, and you will sleep better in weeks like this one.

Consultation & implementation

If you'd like to find out what this means for your own situation, the best step is to book a consultation.