U.S. import prices rose 1.1% in September, above the 0.8% to 1.0% economists expected, depending on the survey, and 8.1% from a year earlier. Fuel led the month, but prices for everything else rose 6.0% over the year, the most since April 2022, even though the dollar was stronger than a year earlier.
The week's inflation data arrived in the order goods travel. Consumer prices on Wednesday, producer prices on Thursday, and on Friday, the prices the country pays for what it buys abroad. All three ran hot.
Import prices rose 1.1% in September, the Labor Department said, following a 0.5% increase in August that was revised down from 0.7%. Over 12 months they were up 8.1%, the largest annual increase since the year ended July 2022, when the index rose 8.8%.
Fuel did much of the monthly work. Fuel import prices jumped 4.8% and petroleum 4.6%. Imported natural gas cost 96.5% more than a year earlier.
The part that is not oil
The more telling number is the one that strips fuel out. Nonfuel import prices rose 0.7% in the month and 6.0% from a year earlier, the biggest annual gain since April 2022. They have not fallen in any month since August 2025. The government named capital goods, industrial supplies other than fuel, consumer goods excluding autos, and autos and parts as the drivers.
That breadth came against a headwind. The dollar averaged about 2.5% more in September than a year earlier, and by mid-October it had reached its strongest level in about a year and a half. A stronger dollar normally makes foreign goods cheaper for American buyers, because each dollar buys more of an exporter's currency. Nonfuel import prices rising at a 6% annual pace anyway suggests the pressure is coming from foreign producers' own costs or from supply chains, not from currency weakness. That is an inference, and the country detail offers a first test: prices of goods imported from China rose 0.7% in September, the most since December 2021, while those from Japan rose 0.6% and from the European Union 0.3%.
The index also measures prices before tariffs are applied, so duties are not part of the 8.1%.
Export prices climbed 2.2% in September after 1.2% in August. Nonagricultural export prices were up 11.8% from a year earlier.
A market that has heard it before
Bond investors did not flinch. The 10-year Treasury yield traded near 5.10% in early afternoon, essentially where it closed on Thursday, according to Treasury data. Fed funds futures put the chance that the Federal Reserve holds rates at its Oct. 27-28 meeting at 85%, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool. The dollar index fell to about 101.6, on course for its first weekly decline in more than a month.
That calm is a judgment in itself. Wednesday's consumer price report showed a 0.6% monthly rise and 3.7% annual inflation, and Thursday's producer prices rose 1.3%, the most since March 2022. Investors appear to have priced the heat already, or to see it as energy-driven and temporary.
Market implications
One reading is that inflation is broadening upstream. Nonfuel import prices at a four-and-a-half-year high, in categories from machinery to consumer goods, typically feed into core goods prices at the register with a lag of several months. If that holds, the Fed's December meeting faces firmer goods inflation than the October meeting does.
A second reading is that this is an energy and freight shock in transit. Fuel and natural gas account for the most violent moves, a reopening of shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz would reverse much of it, and the bond market's indifference suggests investors expect exactly that.
For retailers and other importers, the question is margin. Costs rising 6% a year on nonfuel goods leave a choice between raising prices into a slowing consumer and absorbing the increase.
What to watch
October consumer prices on Nov. 10, the Fed's Oct. 27-28 decision, and the October import-price report on Nov. 17, whose country detail will show whether the gains from China and other suppliers persist. A second month of nonfuel gains above 0.5% while the dollar stays firm would favor the broadening reading.