Productivity program treatment of missing October 2025 source data

BLS quarterly measures of labor productivity and costs use data from several sources. Two key sources are the Current Population Survey and the Consumer Price Index. Data from these sources were not collected in October 2025 because of a lapse in appropriations. This page discusses how the Labor Productivity and Costs program account for the missing data. 

Current Population Survey (CPS)

The Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program uses the Current Population Survey of U.S. households monthly estimates to create an hours worked measure for unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers and for creating adjustment ratios to account for off-the-clock hours worked by salaried workers. Due to a lapse in funding, October 2025 data for the household survey were not collected. For the missing October 2025 data, the LPC program created October estimates as weighted aggregates of September and November data. We also marked October as a missing observation during seasonal adjustment to prevent the imputed values from influencing our seasonal models. Estimated October values were then used in the 3-month average to create fourth quarter 2025 estimates of non-employee hours worked measures, as well as adjusting data for the off-the-clock adjustment.

Consumer Price Index (CPI)

As described in our handbook of methods labor compensation section, the LPC program uses the CPI monthly estimate to deflate current dollar hourly compensation into constant dollar real hourly compensation. Our consumer price series for recent quarters is based on the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U). The trend from 1978 to 2025 is based on the Consumer Price Index Retroactive series (CPI-U-RS). When the CPI-U-RS is updated in April through the previous year, the series is incorporated and the CPI-U is used to push forward the latest released CPI-U-RS series.

For the fourth quarter 2025 preliminary and revised LPC releases, the missing CPI-U index in October 2025 was estimated using the average of September and November values to create an October estimate, which was then used in the 3-month average to create a quarter 4 estimate.

For our May release of first quarter 2026 Labor Productivity and Costs measures, the newly updated R-CPI-U-RS through fourth quarter 2025 was incorporated and the CPI-U was used to push that series forward to first quarter. As was the case with the CPI-U, the October 2025 index was missing and therefore estimated in the CPI-U-RS using the average of September and November to create an October estimate, which was then used in the 3-month average to create quarter 4 estimates underlying real hourly compensation in the Productivity and Costs News Release. 

Last modified date: May 8, 2026