US wholesale prices arrive hotter than expected, up 0.5% from December and 2.9% from a year ago

WASHINGTON — U.S. wholesale prices came in hotter than expected last month.

The Labor Department reported Friday that its producer price index, which measures inflation before it hits consumers, rose 0.5% from December and 2.9% from January 2025. Economists had forecast a 0.3% increase for the month and 1.6% year over year, according to a survey by the data firm FactSet.

Excluding food and energy prices, which bounce around from month to month, so-called core wholesale prices rose 0.8% from December and 3.6% from January 2025 — both higher than forecasters had expected. The year-over-year increase in core prices was the biggest since March of last year.

Driving the increase was an uptick in the wholesale price of services, led by higher profit margins for retailers and wholesalers. The increase suggests that companies are passing along the cost of President Donald Trump's tariffs to their customers.

“Retailers’ tariff bill has come down marginally in the last few months, but they have continued to lift their selling prices,” Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a commentary.

And core good prices climbed 0.7% from December and 4.2% from January 2025 on hefty increases in the prices of cosmetics, pet food, some metals and metal-cutting machinery.

Energy prices were down as gasoline prices dropped 5.5% from December and 15.7% from a year earlier. Wholesale food prices also fell.

The producer price report comes two weeks after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose just 2.4% last month compared to a year earlier, closing in on the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Economists had worried that Trump’s double-digit taxes on imports would drive inflation higher. Their impact has so far been more modest than expected — although inflation remains higher than the Fed would like.

Wholesale prices can offer an early look at where consumer inflation might be headed. Economists also watch it because some of its components, notably measures of health care and financial services, flow into the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index.

In December, PCE inflation rose faster than economists had forecast, climbing 2.9% from a year earlier — biggest such increase since March 2024.

The Fed cut its benchmark rate three times last year to support a sluggish job market. But it’s been reluctant to cut further until it sees what happens to inflation. After Friday’s producer price report, economist Ben Ayers of Nationwide said, “we expect the Fed to remain on pause during its upcoming March meeting.’’