Guide · Gift reciprocity
Why this site’s 2025 inflation figure is missing a month
Every other year in the gift reciprocity calculator averages twelve months of federal price data. 2025 averages eleven — because October 2025 was never collected, and the government agency that collects it says so plainly.
The short answer
The Bureau of Labor Statistics could not collect Consumer Price Index survey data for October 2025, because the federal government was in a lapse in appropriations — a shutdown — from October 1 through November 12, 2025, and CPI field collection was suspended for that stretch. sourcedBLS did not publish an all-items CPI value for October and cannot retroactively collect it. So the 2025 annual average this site carries a gift forward with is built from eleven months of real data, not twelve — and the page says so rather than quietly averaging around the gap.
What actually happened
BLS’s own account of the shutdown’s effect on CPI collection is direct about both the cause and the consequence: sourced
- Federal agencies, including BLS, operated at reduced staffing or were shut down during the lapse in appropriations from October 1, 2025 through November 12, 2025.
- Most CPI operations, including the price collection that feeds the index, were suspended for that period.
- BLS will not publish an all-items CPI value, or an all-items-less-food-and-energy value, for October 2025 — the data simply doesn’t exist to publish.
The November 2025 CPI release, delayed by the same shutdown, moved to December 18, 2025.
Why we don’t patch the hole
It would be easy to interpolate a plausible October figure from September and November and average in twelve numbers instead of eleven — nobody would notice, and the resulting 2025 average would look identical in shape to every other year on the page. house judgment — BLS publishes the eleven-month figure as its own annual average; declining to smooth over the gap ourselves is our editorial choice, not theirs. Inventing a number to make a federal data series tidier is exactly the move this site exists to call out when other calculators do it with a dollar figure. The honest version is a real average missing a real month, labeled as such.
What this doesn’t mean
- It doesn’t mean the 2025 figure is unreliable.An eleven-month average built from real collected prices is still a real average — it’s simply missing one month’s data point rather than smoothing over it with a guess.
- It doesn’t mean every year on the calculator has this issue. 2025 is the only year in the site’s CPI table built from eleven months instead of twelve; every other year is a full annual average.
- It doesn’t mean the current-month figure is affected.This site’s “today” column uses the newest published month directly, not a 2025 average, so a gift you’re carrying forward to this year isn’t touched by the October gap at all.
Have an old gift amount you want to carry forward?
The gift reciprocity calculator carries a past gift to today’s dollars using BLS’s own annual averages — eleven months for 2025, twelve for every other year, both labeled on the ledger.
Carry the gift forward →Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — 2025 Federal Government Shutdown Impact on the CPI — the collection suspension, the missing October all-items value, and the rescheduled November release date.
- BLS — CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items (series CUUR0000SA0) — the annual averages used to carry a gift amount forward.
Informational only. This guide reports BLS’s own published account of the 2025 shutdown’s effect on CPI collection and labels our decision not to interpolate the missing month as ours. Last reviewed: August 2026.
More on how KindHow separates a source from a house call: the published methodology. Every guide is listed on the guides index.