Rent Escalation From a CPI Month That Was Never Published
Ask the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the October 2025 CPI-U and it returns a dash. The 43-day appropriations lapse killed the collection and BLS said it could not go back for it. Leases that measure rent from October to October now have a base month that does not exist, the index substitution clause most of them contain does not fire, and the derivatives market and BLS's own productivity program filled the hole with two different numbers.