Employment Cost Index

Employment Cost Index for Q2 2026 is scheduled for release at 08:30 EDT on 31 July 2026.

Cadence Quarterly
Next release 08:30 EDT
Countdown until release

What it measures

The change in the cost of labour — wages, salaries and benefits — free of the effect of employment shifting between occupations and industries. The Federal Reserve treats it as a cleaner read on labour costs than average hourly earnings.

Times shown in America/New York · Schedule source: BLS release schedule · Licence: public domain (a work of the U.S. federal government)

Impact on the Treasury curve

Low -0.35 bp from the 10-year level

On this indicator’s past release days the Treasury curve moved that much more than it did on a quiet day — a day on which none of the tracked indicators released — across 26 clean release days , with 88 excluded because another tracked release landed the same day. It is a backward-looking measure of what already happened. It is not a forecast of the next release, and it is not advice. Read the full methodology.

Upcoming releases

Date Time (America/New York) Reference period Calendar
08:30 EDT Q2 2026 .ics
08:30 EDT Q3 2026 .ics

Past releases

The dates the agency actually published on, newest first. These are release days, not the reference periods the figures describe.

Release date Time (America/New York) Reference period
08:30 EDT Q1 2026
08:30 EST Q4 2025
08:30 EST Q3 2025

No consensus, and why

No consensus shown — we don’t license survey estimates. The “expected” figure on a commercial calendar is a survey of economists sold by a data vendor. It is not a government work, there is no public-domain source for it, and we would rather say so than print an empty column. There are no prediction-market odds here either, for the same licensing reason.

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