Inflation is one of the first things critics bring up about the Biden years. But the full record shows something that often gets left out: after peaking in 2022, inflation came down quickly and stayed in a fairly narrow range for the rest of Biden’s term. Under President Trump’s second term, the trend has gone the other way.
Two charts built from the same government data make it easier to see the actual pattern — and where the data itself has gaps and asterisks worth knowing about before you draw a conclusion.
Both charts use the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), all items, measured as the 12-month percent change. The comparison covers two equal-length windows: Joe Biden’s final 20 months in office and Donald Trump’s first 20 months of his second term.
How We Got Here: The Last 10 Years
Yes, inflation got high. It climbed through 2021 and peaked at about 9 percent in mid-2022, the highest in four decades. Economists still debate how much of that came from pandemic supply-chain disruptions, energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pandemic-era spending, and Federal Reserve policy.
What the chart makes just as clear is what happened next:
- A rapid decline. Inflation fell by roughly two-thirds in about a year, from its mid-2022 peak to about 3 percent by mid-2023.
- No rebound. Many economists warned that bringing inflation down would require a recession. The chart shows no shaded recession bar after 2020; inflation came down while the economy kept growing.
- Stability afterward. From mid-2023 to the end of Biden’s term in January 2025, inflation stayed between 2.4 and 3.7 percent. That is above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target and a bit higher than the 2017–2019 years, but far from the 2022 peak and steady from month to month.
That steady period is the starting point for the comparison below.
Chart 1: The Straight Timeline
The first chart simply plots inflation month by month, in actual calendar order, from June 2023 through September 2026. It’s one continuous line because it’s tracking one thing — the inflation rate — regardless of who’s in the White House at any given point. Read this way, you can see inflation drift down through 2024, bottom out in the low-2% range in late 2024 and early 2025, then climb back toward 4% by spring 2026 before easing — and then ticking back up again by September.
Chart 2: Lining Up the Two Terms, Month for Month
The second chart takes those same two 20-month stretches and re-plots them on a shared axis — “month 1” through “month 20” of each comparison window — rather than by calendar date. Biden’s final 20 months are the blue line; Trump’s first 20 months are the red line. This is the “apples to apples” version: it lets you compare, say, month 10 of Biden’s stretch to month 10 of Trump’s, instead of comparing different points in the economic cycle.
The dotted lines are simple trend lines fitted to each series. Biden’s trend slopes downward, from roughly 3.5% to 2.7%. Trump’s slopes upward, from roughly 2.4% to 3.6%. Both lines bounce around month to month — inflation data is noisy — but the trend lines summarize the broad direction over each window.
The Climb Through Spring 2026 — and the Latest Reading
The sharpest move in either chart is the run-up in Trump’s line from early 2026 into the spring. BLS reported CPI inflation rising to 3.8% in April 2026, and then to 4.2% in May 2026 — the highest annual rate in nearly three years, with energy prices a major driver of that month’s increase. A New York Federal Reserve analysis separately tied a meaningful share of 2026’s price increases to tariffs, pointing to roughly a 3% jump in prices across dozens of goods categories earlier in the year.
From that May peak, the rate eased over the summer, settling at 3.4% in August 2026. But the newest data point — September 2026, the most recent CPI reading available — ticked back up to 3.7%, interrupting what had looked like a cooling trend.
What This Does — and Doesn’t — Tell You
A few honest caveats worth keeping in mind before using either chart to score political points:
- 20 months isn’t a full term. Both windows are snapshots, not complete records — Biden’s full term and Trump’s eventual full second term could tell a different story.
- Presidents don’t set CPI directly. Inflation reflects the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy, global supply chains, energy prices, and in this stretch, tariff policy — not a single administration’s spending choices alone, though tariffs are a policy lever a president does control directly.
- The trend lines are simple linear fits. They describe direction, not causation, and a few high or low months can tilt a short trend line more than they’d tilt a longer-run average.
- The data gap matters. Any month-by-month comparison that spans October 2025 is working with an acknowledged hole in the official record, not a smoothed or estimated substitute.
- The series isn’t finished. September 2026’s uptick, right after two months of cooling, is a reminder that a short trend line can reverse with the next release.
Why There’s a Gap in the Red Line
If you look closely at the charts, Trump’s line has a single missing data point — month 9, October 2025. That’s not an error — it reflects a real interruption in the government’s own data collection. The federal government shutdown that began October 1, 2025 forced the Bureau of Labor Statistics to pause data collection entirely. The agency postponed the September 2025 CPI report from its original October 15 date to October 24, 2025, and said no other releases would be produced until government funding resumed. The BLS ultimately announced it would not publish an October 2025 CPI report at all, because the shutdown prevented it from collecting that month’s pricing data — pushing the next release, for November, to December 18, 2025. That’s the gap you see in the chart: it’s a missing month of real-world data, not a dip in prices.
Bottom Line
Read plainly, the data shows inflation trending down through the final stretch of Biden’s term, landing around 3.0% by his last month in office — and then trending back up over the first 20 months of Trump’s second term, peaking at 4.2% in May 2026 before cooling to 3.4% in August — only to rise again to 3.7% in September, the latest reading available. The underlying CPI-U data is solid; the main thing to watch for is treating the trend lines as more precise or more causal than a 20-month, noisy, interrupted data series can really support.
The Numbers, Month by Month
| Month | Biden (final 20 mo.) | Trump (first 20 mo.) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jun 2023 — 3.1% | Feb 2025 — 2.8% |
| 2 | Jul 2023 — 3.3% | Mar 2025 — 2.4% |
| 3 | Aug 2023 — 3.7% | Apr 2025 — 2.3% |
| 4 | Sep 2023 — 3.7% | May 2025 — 2.4% |
| 5 | Oct 2023 — 3.3% | Jun 2025 — 2.7% |
| 6 | Nov 2023 — 3.1% | Jul 2025 — 2.7% |
| 7 | Dec 2023 — 3.3% | Aug 2025 — 2.9% |
| 8 | Jan 2024 — 3.1% | Sep 2025 — 3.0% |
| 9 | Feb 2024 — 3.2% | Oct 2025 — no data (shutdown) |
| 10 | Mar 2024 — 3.5% | Nov 2025 — 2.7% |
| 11 | Apr 2024 — 3.4% | Dec 2025 — 2.7% |
| 12 | May 2024 — 3.2% | Jan 2026 — 2.4% |
| 13 | Jun 2024 — 3.0% | Feb 2026 — 2.4% |
| 14 | Jul 2024 — 2.9% | Mar 2026 — 3.3% |
| 15 | Aug 2024 — 2.6% | Apr 2026 — 3.8% |
| 16 | Sep 2024 — 2.4% | May 2026 — 4.2% |
| 17 | Oct 2024 — 2.6% | Jun 2026 — 3.5% |
| 18 | Nov 2024 — 2.7% | Jul 2026 — 3.3% |
| 19 | Dec 2024 — 2.9% | Aug 2026 — 3.4% |
| 20 | Jan 2025 — 3.0% | Sep 2026 — 3.7% |
Data source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED, CPI-U, All Items, 12-month percent change (CPIAUCSL_PC1).