US Headline Inflation follows consensus, missing the latest disinflationary trends

Welcome to Truflation's macro update for Jan 13, 2026. 

Today, our independent US CPI inflation index fell from 1.87 to 1.74%, driven by the cooling in the Owned Dwellings category.

Jan 13, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also released its US CPI inflation for December 2025, which came at the consensus expectations +2.7% for YoY (Year-over-Year) and +0.3% for MoM (Month-over-Month).

The US Core Inflation CPI both came slightly cooler than their forecasts at +2.6% and +0.2% respectively.

The Truflation data team shared our BLS CPI prediction of 2.6% based on our correlation model. We expected inflation to come in slightly lower than the final 2.7% released by the BLS, which remained unchanged from the previous month and largely met the market consensus.

Some categories of data within the current BLS release came as a surprise and did not reflect the real price data trends we saw in our datasets, so we sincerely believe BLS still has some catching up to do across multiple categories that we see cooling quite rapidly.

Just a reminder that while BLS aggregates 60-80k household surveys, Truflation gathers real price data from merchants, and our system analyzes over 35 million real-time data points from over 70 providers across multiple inflation metrics, categories, and subcategories with a YoY CPI updated daily.

Jan 13, we also held our monthly CPI X Spaces where we discussed many nuances of the BLS methodology and issues with the latest BLS releases with our esteemed guests:

• James (Jim) Bianco from Bianco Research, a wealth management expert and macro analyst specializing in helping institutional investors.
• Dr EJ Antoni (PhD), an economist at the Heritage Foundation and a strong proponent of innovating the government data collection methodologies, who has also recently joined Truflation as an advisor.

You can listen to the recording here.

Some prominent analysts opted to share Truflation US Inflation data rather than the BLS report today, with our biggest fan, Anthony Pompliano, also providing an explainer video on the BLS CPI methodology.

In other macro news

• US Gasoline hit an average of $2.9 at the pump, the lowest since 2021.
• The US government recorded a $144.7 billion budget deficit in December 2025, compared with a $86.7 billion deficit in the same month a year earlier.
• The BLS reported no change in real average hourly earnings for all employees from November to December. This result stems from an increase of 0.3 percent in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in the CPI, meaning earnings inflation matched the price inflation in December.

Remember to take advantage of our 26% discount on all Truflation subscriptions, valid till the end of January, with the code HAPPY2026.