Japan CPI: 2026 Schedule, Dates and What to Expect

Japan’s consumer price index (CPI) measures how fast the prices households pay for goods and services are rising. It is compiled and published monthly by the Statistics Bureau of Japan, part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The next nationwide release is on Friday, September 18, 2026 at 8:30 am JST, which is 7:30 pm ET on Thursday, September 17 and 12:30 am in London on Friday, September 18. That report covers price data for August 2026. Full schedule and background: Japan CPI release dates. Every date on this page is available as an ICS download and Google Calendar feed, so the release drops into your own diary automatically.

Japan matters to global investors far beyond its own borders. For three decades the country was the world’s textbook case of deflation, and Japanese savers exported capital abroad in search of yield. Now that inflation has returned, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is slowly raising interest rates, its policy rate stood at 1.00% after the July 31, 2026 meeting, the highest since 1995. Each CPI print feeds directly into expectations for the next move, and therefore into the yen, Japanese government bond yields and the global carry trade that has funded positions in US and European assets for years.

2026 and 2027 schedule

The table below lists every scheduled nationwide Japan CPI release currently confirmed by the Statistics Bureau. Each release refers to the previous calendar month: the September 18, 2026 report covers August 2026 prices. Dates are shown in local Japan time; the release is always 8:30 am JST, which is the previous evening in New York and just after midnight in London.

The pattern is consistent: the nationwide CPI lands on a Friday in the second half of the month, roughly three weeks after the month it describes has ended. A separate Tokyo-area CPI, treated by markets as an early guide to the national figure, is published at the end of each month for the current month.

What is Japan CPI?

The consumer price index tracks the average change in prices paid by Japanese households for a fixed basket of goods and services: food, rent, electricity and gas, transport, clothing, medical care, education, communications and recreation. The index is rebased every five years, and the current series uses 2025 as its base year. Prices are collected in shops, from utility tariffs and from online retailers across all 47 prefectures.

Japan publishes three headline measures, and confusing them is the single most common mistake made by people reading the release for the first time:

• Headline CPI (all items): everything in the basket, including fresh food and energy.
• Core CPI (all items less fresh food): Japan’s definition of “core” excludes fresh food but still includes energy. This is the number the Bank of Japan has historically targeted at 2%, and the one that moves markets most.
• Core-core CPI (all items less fresh food and energy): the measure closest to what Americans and Europeans call core inflation, and the best guide to underlying domestic price pressure.

Because Japan’s core measure keeps energy in, the series is unusually sensitive to oil prices, electricity tariffs and government subsidies. When Tokyo pays part of household energy bills, published inflation falls even though underlying pressure has not changed. That gap is exactly why the Bank of Japan also publishes its own underlying price gauge that strips out both fresh food and the effect of government measures. In July 2026 that gauge rose 2.3% year on year while the official core reading was 1.8%, according to Bloomberg-reported BOJ data.

The Statistics Bureau also publishes regional indices and a Tokyo metropolitan CPI. Tokyo data arrive about three weeks earlier than the national figure, so traders use them as a preview, though the two can diverge because Tokyo has a different rent and services mix from rural Japan.

How is it calculated?

Japan’s CPI is a Laspeyres-type fixed-basket index. The Statistics Bureau selects around 580 items, weights each by its share of average household spending as measured by the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, then tracks about 100,000 individual prices each month through the Retail Price Survey. Weights and the basket composition are revised at each five-yearly rebasing, so the index reflects changing consumption habits, streaming subscriptions in, video rental out.

Two features are worth understanding. First, owner-occupied housing is treated as “imputed rent”, an estimate of what homeowners would pay to rent their own homes. Japanese rents move very slowly, so this large basket component acts as a permanent drag on measured inflation compared with countries that use house-price-linked methods. Second, administered prices matter a lot: electricity and gas tariffs, medical fees, public transport fares, high school tuition and mobile phone charges are all shaped by policy. Government subsidy programmes and fee reforms have repeatedly pushed the Japanese CPI around by several tenths of a percentage point in a single month.

Revisions are small and infrequent by international standards. Monthly year-on-year rates are occasionally adjusted by a tenth of a point when seasonal factors or late price data are incorporated, but Japan does not produce the sort of large back-revisions common in US labour data. Seasonally adjusted month-on-month figures are published alongside the year-on-year rates.

The Bank of Japan does not compile the CPI. It sets policy in response to it. The BOJ’s price stability target is 2% year-on-year growth in the CPI, adopted in January 2013, and the bank publishes its own quarterly Outlook for Economic Activity and Prices with forecasts for core CPI over the coming fiscal years.

What time is it released and where?

Nationwide CPI is released at 8:30 am Japan Standard Time. Japan does not observe daylight saving time, so the local time never changes, but the overseas equivalent does:

For the September 18, 2026 release, that means 7:30 pm ET on Thursday, September 17 for US-based readers. London traders get the number just after midnight, which is why the initial reaction usually shows up in the yen and in Japanese government bond futures rather than in equities.

The official release, including English-language tables and the full time series, is published by the Statistics Bureau of Japan. Data are also loaded into the e-Stat portal and the BOJ’s statistics pages. There is no lock-up or embargoed press briefing of the kind used for some European releases: the figures appear on the website at the scheduled minute, and newswires publish immediately.

Recent readings

The most recent nationwide report, published on August 21, 2026 and covering July 2026, showed headline inflation at 1.9% year on year, the highest reading since December 2025 according to Trading Economics. Core CPI, excluding fresh food, rose 1.8%, matching the consensus forecast in a Reuters poll as reported by CNBC. The core-core measure, excluding fresh food and energy, was 1.9%.

Source: Statistics Bureau of Japan, with month-by-month summaries compiled by Trading Economics and the Bank of Japan’s underlying inflation gauge as reported by Bloomberg. The full official back series is on the Statistics Bureau CPI page linked above.

Two details explain the July 2026 pattern. Energy prices rose year on year for the first time since November 2025 as the government scaled back subsidies, contributing 0.6 percentage points, and fresh food prices jumped about 7%. Producer prices, a leading indicator for consumer inflation, ran far hotter at 7.2% in July 2026, according to CNBC’s report on Bank of Japan data, suggesting pipeline pressure that subsidies have been masking at the till.

A consensus forecast for the September 18, 2026 release has not yet been published. Reuters and Bloomberg typically survey economists in the week before the data, so a median estimate for August 2026 core CPI should appear from around September 11, 2026.

How do markets react?

Japan CPI is a medium-impact release most months and a high-impact one when the Bank of Japan is close to a decision. Because it arrives while New York is closing and London is asleep, the first reaction shows up in three places:

• The yen. A hotter-than-expected core reading raises the odds of a BOJ rate rise, which tends to strengthen the yen against the dollar, euro and pound. A soft reading does the opposite. Moves of a few tenths of a percent in USD/JPY within minutes are routine; a genuine surprise can move it more than 1%.
• Japanese government bonds (JGBs). Higher inflation pushes yields on 2-year and 10-year JGBs up, because investors demand more compensation for holding fixed income when prices are rising and rates may follow.
• Japanese equities. The Nikkei 225 and Topix often respond in the opposite direction to the yen, since exporters earn in dollars. A weaker yen has historically supported Japanese share prices, a stronger yen has weighed on them.

The global spillover comes through interest rate differentials. For years, investors borrowed cheaply in yen to buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere, the so-called carry trade. When Japanese inflation and rates rise, that trade becomes more expensive, and money can flow back to Tokyo. That is why a Japanese CPI print can nudge US Treasury yields, European bond markets and even global equity volatility.

Context matters more than the number in isolation. After the July 2026 data, State Street Investment Management’s APAC economist Krishna Bhimavarapu said the rise in headline inflation strengthened his conviction that the BOJ’s next move would be a September rate rise, as quoted by CNBC. Earlier, a Reuters summary of the BOJ’s July meeting opinions showed at least three of the nine board members arguing that rates could rise faster than the bank’s recent pace of roughly two increases a year. Against that backdrop, each CPI release is read as evidence for or against an imminent move rather than as a standalone statistic.

Traders also watch the gap between the official core rate and the BOJ’s underlying gauge. When subsidies hold official inflation below 2% while underlying inflation sits above it, the bank can justify tightening even on a soft-looking headline. That asymmetry has repeatedly surprised markets that focused only on the front-page number.

What It Means for Your Money

If you live in Japan, the CPI is the most direct measure of whether your pay rise has kept up with the cost of living. Real wages, that is wages adjusted for inflation, are calculated using this index, and so are some pension adjustments. Rising food and electricity prices hit lower-income households hardest because those items take a larger share of their spending.

Borrowing costs. Japanese mortgage rates are heavily influenced by BOJ policy. Most Japanese home loans are variable rate, tied to short-term benchmarks, so a policy rate that has moved from below zero to 1.00% since 2024 raises monthly payments for millions of households. Higher inflation prints make further increases more likely.

Savings. For decades Japanese deposits paid essentially nothing. As rates rise, savings accounts and Japanese government bonds finally offer a return, though whether that return beats inflation depends on how quickly banks pass increases on.

Currency and travel. The yen is one of the most traded currencies in the world. Hotter Japanese inflation tends to lift the yen, making Japanese exports pricier and a holiday in Japan more expensive for visitors from the UK, Europe and the US. A softer print tends to weaken the yen, which has made Japan an unusually cheap destination in recent years.

Pensions and investments outside Japan. If you hold a global equity fund, a tracker or a workplace pension in the UK, Europe or Australia, you almost certainly own Japanese shares, typically 5% to 6% of a developed-market index. Japanese monetary policy also affects global bond yields, so a sustained rise in Japanese inflation can indirectly raise the yields on gilts, bunds and Treasuries held in your pension’s fixed-income allocation.

What to do with the number. One month rarely changes anything for a long-term saver. The useful habit is to watch the trend in core and core-core over three to six months, and to compare it with the BOJ’s 2% target. Persistent readings above target signal higher borrowing costs and a firmer yen; persistent readings below it signal the opposite.

Related economic events

• US CPI Report: the American inflation series, and the single most watched price release in global markets.
• US PCE Report: the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, useful for comparing how different central banks define their targets.
• US Jobs Report: monthly payrolls and wage growth, a key driver of the dollar and therefore of USD/JPY.
• US GDP Report: quarterly growth data that shape the global rate outlook alongside inflation prints.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the next Japan CPI release?

The next nationwide release is on Friday, September 18, 2026 at 8:30 am JST (7:30 pm ET on September 17, 12:30 am London on September 18), covering August 2026 prices.

What time is Japan CPI released?

Always 8:30 am Japan Standard Time. Japan does not use daylight saving, so the overseas equivalent shifts with clock changes elsewhere: currently 7:30 pm ET the previous evening and 12:30 am in London.

How often is Japan CPI published?

Monthly. The nationwide index is released roughly three weeks after the reference month ends, usually on a Friday, and a Tokyo-area index is published at the end of each month as an early indicator.

Where can I find the official release?

On the Statistics Bureau of Japan’s CPI page at stat.go.jp, which publishes English-language summaries and the full historical series, with the same data mirrored on the e-Stat portal.

How does Japan CPI affect interest rates?

The Bank of Japan targets 2% inflation, so sustained core readings above target strengthen the case for rate rises, while soft readings support a pause. The policy rate was held at 1.00% on July 31, 2026 by an eight-to-one vote, according to Focus Economics.