China CPI: 2026 Schedule, Dates and What to Expect

China’s consumer price index (CPI) is the country’s main measure of inflation, published every month by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS). It tracks what households pay for a fixed basket of goods and services, from pork and vegetables to rent, petrol, medical care and travel. The next release is due on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at 9:30 am Beijing time (CST), which is 9:30 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 8 and 2:30 am in London on September 9. That report will cover prices in August 2026. The most recent reading, for July 2026, showed the CPI up 0.5% on a year earlier, the softest pace since January.

China is the world’s second-largest economy and its largest manufacturer, so its inflation rate matters well beyond its borders. Weak Chinese consumer prices tend to mean cheaper exported goods for shoppers in the United States, the United Kingdom and the euro area, and they raise the odds of more stimulus from Beijing, which moves commodity prices, mining shares and currencies from the Australian dollar to the Chilean peso. The full 2026 and 2027 release calendar is below, and you can subscribe to every date on this page through the ICS and Google Calendar feed so each release appears in your own diary with the correct local time.

2026 and 2027 release schedule

The NBS publishes CPI and the producer price index (PPI) together, normally on the ninth day of the month at 9:30 am Beijing time, with the date shifting when the ninth falls on a weekend or a public holiday. Each release covers the previous calendar month. All times below are Beijing time; the equivalent in New York is 9:30 pm on the previous evening and 2:30 am in London on the release date itself.

Dates are taken from the NBS statistical release calendar. The bureau publishes its schedule a year at a time and occasionally moves a date by a day or two; where that happens, the table above is updated to match the official calendar.

What is China CPI?

The consumer price index measures the average change in the prices Chinese households actually pay. Statisticians price a representative basket of goods and services each month and compare the cost with the same month a year earlier (the year-on-year rate) and with the previous month (the month-on-month rate). A reading of 0.5% year on year means the basket costs 0.5% more than it did twelve months before.

The basket is grouped into eight major categories: food, tobacco and liquor; clothing; residence; household facilities, articles and services; transport and communication; education, culture and recreation; health care and medical services; and miscellaneous goods and services. Food carries a much heavier weight in China’s index than in most rich economies, at close to a third of the basket according to Trading Economics, with residence next at roughly 17%. That is why swings in the price of pork, vegetables and fruit can move the headline rate by several tenths of a percentage point on their own.

Alongside the headline number, the NBS publishes core CPI, which strips out food and energy. Those two categories are volatile, driven by weather, disease outbreaks in livestock and global oil prices, so core inflation is a cleaner read on underlying demand. In July 2026 core CPI rose 0.9% year on year, down from 1.0% in June, according to Moody’s Analytics. Economists watch the gap between headline and core closely: a headline rate near zero with core inflation close to 1% suggests the softness is coming from food and fuel rather than from collapsing consumer demand.

China’s inflation problem in recent years has been the opposite of the one facing the United States and Europe. Annual CPI averaged 0.0% in 2025 after -0.1% in 2024, with several months of outright falls in the index, a condition known as deflation. Falling prices sound welcome, but sustained deflation discourages spending (why buy today if it is cheaper next month?), squeezes company profits and makes existing debts harder to repay. Beijing has responded with interest rate cuts, consumer trade-in subsidies and property support measures, and each CPI release is treated as a scorecard on whether those efforts are working.

How is it calculated?

The NBS collects prices from a large national sample of physical retail outlets, service providers, farmers’ markets and online sellers across urban and rural areas, covering all provinces. Prices for fast-moving items such as fresh food are collected several times a month; others are collected once. The bureau then weights each category according to household spending surveys, so items that account for more of a typical household’s budget influence the index more.

The weights and the reference base are refreshed on a five-year cycle. The NBS confirmed that from January 2026 the CPI is compiled on a 2025 base period, with adjustments to survey categories, representative items, sampled outlets and category weights to reflect changing consumption patterns. The bureau estimated the average effect of this base rotation on monthly year-on-year CPI at about 0.06 percentage points, small but worth knowing when comparing 2026 readings with older data.

Two quirks matter when reading the numbers. First, the timing of Chinese New Year moves food and services prices sharply, and because the festival falls in January in some years and February in others, the January and February readings are hard to compare year to year. The NBS and most economists therefore look at the January to February period combined. In January 2026, for example, the CPI rose just 0.2% year on year, down from 0.8% in December 2025, largely because the previous year’s Spring Festival had fallen in January and created a high base for comparison. Second, unlike the US CPI, China’s monthly headline figures are not routinely revised after publication; the last methodological revision to the index came in 2011, according to Trading Economics.

What time is it released and where?

The NBS publishes CPI and PPI at 9:30 am China Standard Time (UTC+8), which is:

• 9:30 pm Eastern Time the previous evening in New York
• 2:30 am London time on the release date
• 3:30 am in Frankfurt and Paris, 11:30 am in Sydney (during Australian daylight saving), 10:30 am in Tokyo

China does not observe daylight saving time, so the Beijing release time never changes. The offset to New York and London does change twice a year when those cities shift clocks. For the September 9, 2026 release the data lands during the Asian morning, roughly 30 minutes after mainland equity markets open, and while US cash equity markets are closed.

The release appears on the NBS website in Chinese first, with an English summary published shortly afterwards in the bureau’s press release section. There is no lock-up or embargoed briefing for journalists of the kind used by some Western statistics agencies, and the data are posted simultaneously to the NBS national data portal, where the full series and category detail can be downloaded. The bureau usually publishes a short interpretation from one of its senior statisticians alongside the figures, explaining the main drivers of the month’s move.

Historical data

Year-on-year change in China’s consumer price index, most recent 12 published months:

Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China monthly CPI press releases. The October 2025 figure is derived from the NBS November 2025 release, which reported that the year-on-year rate widened by 0.5 percentage points from the previous month to 0.7%. Note that readings from January 2026 onwards use the 2025 base period.

The pattern in the table is the story markets have been trading: a shift out of deflation in late 2025, a run of readings above 1% in the spring of 2026, then a renewed slowdown to 0.5% in July as food prices kept falling and transport costs cooled. Food deflation has been the persistent drag, with food prices down 1.5% year on year in July 2026 while non-food prices rose 0.9%.

How do markets react?

China CPI is a medium-impact release rather than a market-shaking one, largely because it rarely changes expectations for the People’s Bank of China at a single stroke. It does, however, reliably move a recognisable set of assets in the Asian session.

A weaker than expected reading is generally read as evidence of soft domestic demand. That tends to lift Chinese government bonds (pushing yields down), weigh on the offshore yuan, and cut both ways for equities: consumer and materials shares often fall, while investors sometimes bid up the broader index on the view that Beijing will have to add stimulus. Industrial commodities such as iron ore and copper, plus the Australian and New Zealand dollars, which trade as proxies for Chinese demand, are usually the fastest movers outside China itself.

A stronger reading, particularly one driven by core inflation rather than a single spike in pork or vegetable prices, is treated as a sign that reflation is taking hold. That has tended to support Chinese equities, cyclical commodities and the yuan, and to trim expectations of further cuts to the loan prime rate and the reserve requirement ratio.

The size of the surprise relative to forecasts matters more than the level. Trading Economics reported that the July 2026 reading of 0.5% undershot market forecasts of 0.8%, and that June’s 1.0% came in slightly below expectations of 1.1%. Two consecutive misses of that kind carry more weight with investors than one isolated result. Because CPI is published together with PPI, the factory-gate price measure, traders often read the two as a pair: PPI has spent long stretches in negative territory, and a narrowing of that decline is taken as an early signal that pricing power is returning to Chinese industry.

For investors outside Asia, the transmission runs mainly through goods prices and monetary policy expectations. Persistently weak Chinese prices help hold down the cost of imported manufactured goods in the UK, the euro area and the US, one factor that central banks in those regions have cited when assessing the outlook for goods inflation. Compare the numbers with the US CPI report to see how differently the two economies have behaved since 2023.

What It Means for Your Money

You will not see China’s CPI on your bank statement, but it reaches your finances through several practical channels.

• Prices in the shops. China makes a large share of the world’s consumer electronics, clothing, furniture and household goods. When Chinese producer and consumer prices are flat or falling, exporters have room to keep their prices low, which helps hold down the cost of those goods in UK, European and US shops. Tariffs and shipping costs can offset this.
• Mortgages and savings rates. Cheap imported goods make it easier for the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates without reigniting inflation. Lower policy rates eventually feed into cheaper tracker and new fixed-rate mortgages, and lower returns on easy-access savings accounts. A sustained Chinese reflation would work in the opposite direction.
• Pensions and investments. If you hold a global equity fund, an emerging markets fund or a mining stock, Chinese inflation data are part of what moves your valuation. Miners, luxury goods groups, carmakers and semiconductor firms all draw significant revenue from Chinese consumers, and weak inflation there usually means weak nominal spending growth for them.
• Currencies. A softer yuan, which weak inflation tends to encourage, generally strengthens the dollar and can push the pound and euro higher against Asian currencies. That affects the cost of holidays, of goods priced in dollars, and the sterling value of overseas investments.
• Jobs and wages. Chinese demand supports employment in export industries worldwide, from German machine tools to Australian mining and Brazilian agriculture. Prolonged deflation in China is a signal of weak demand that can eventually show up in hiring and pay in those sectors.

None of this is a reason to change a long-term plan on the back of one monthly release. The value of watching the series is in the trend: several months of a rising core rate, or several months of falling prices, tells you far more than a single figure.

Related economic events

• US CPI Report: the US inflation measure, released monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the most closely watched inflation print in global markets.
• US PCE Report: the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, published with personal income and spending data.
• US Jobs Report: monthly non-farm payrolls and unemployment, the other half of the Fed’s mandate.
• US GDP Report: quarterly growth data for the world’s largest economy, useful context for Chinese export demand.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the next China CPI release?

The next release is on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at 9:30 am Beijing time, which is 9:30 pm ET on September 8 and 2:30 am in London on September 9. It covers prices in August 2026.

What time is China CPI published in the UK and US?

Always 9:30 am Beijing time, which equals 2:30 am in London and 9:30 pm the previous evening in New York while both are on summer time. China does not use daylight saving, so only the foreign offsets change.

How often is China CPI published?

Monthly, normally on the ninth day of the following month, with the date shifted when the ninth falls on a weekend or holiday. The producer price index is released at the same time.

Where can I find the official release?

On the National Bureau of Statistics of China website, in the press release and statistical data sections, with an English summary published shortly after the Chinese version. The bureau’s release calendar lists the confirmed dates.

Is there a consensus forecast for the August 2026 reading?

A consensus forecast for the report due on September 9, 2026 has not yet been published. Reuters and Bloomberg typically survey economists in the week before the release, and the prior reading stands at 0.5% year on year for July 2026.