Economy / Consumer Expectations / November 10, 2026
Americans See Steady Inflation but a More Uneven Job Market
New York Fed survey: steady inflation expectations, rising unemployment worries and debt-payment risk, but improving job-finding confidence.
Americans' inflation expectations stopped rising in October, but their assessment of financial risk became more complicated. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Survey of Consumer Expectations, released November 9, put median expected inflation at 3.9% a year ahead, 3.3% three years ahead and 3.0% five years ahead. Each matched September's reading. Beneath that calm headline, respondents assigned greater odds to rising national unemployment and missing a debt payment, while also becoming slightly more confident about finding work after a job loss.
The survey was conducted from October 1 through October 31, 2026. It therefore captures expectations formed during that month, rather than reactions to developments after the fieldwork ended. Its publication supplies new evidence about beliefs, not a new measurement of October's actual price increases, unemployment rate or spending. That boundary is essential to interpreting every figure that follows.
The stable headline conceals different kinds of risk
The inflation figures are medians: they describe the middle of the distribution of respondents' expected inflation rates. They do not mean every participant gave the same answer, nor do they establish that inflation will follow that path. The three horizons also refer to different future periods. The three-year reading is not a forecast that prices will rise by a cumulative 3.3% over three years.
The survey's methodology adds another important distinction. For overall inflation, participants assign probabilities to ranges of possible price changes. Researchers fit a probability distribution to those answers, calculate an expected rate for each person and then summarize those individual expectations with a median. This is more informative than treating the headline as a simple average of one-number guesses. It preserves the possibility that a person considers several outcomes plausible.
The October release reported less disagreement among respondents at the one- and five-year horizons, with disagreement unchanged at three years. Disagreement is the distance between the 75th and 25th percentiles of respondents' expected rates. It asks how far apart different people's views are. Separately, median uncertainty fell at the one- and three-year horizons and was unchanged at five years. Uncertainty concerns the range of outcomes within an individual's forecast.
Everyday prices do not move as one basket
The survey's category-level expectations give the headline some household context. Expected gasoline price growth declined by 0.6 percentage point to 4.2%. Food price growth expectations stayed at 5.5%. Expectations increased to 9.3% for medical care and 7.6% for college education, both up 0.1 percentage point. Rent expectations rose more substantially, by 0.9 percentage point to 7.7%.
These are median expected changes over the coming year, not reported price increases that have already occurred. A decline in expected gasoline inflation to a positive rate still means respondents anticipate higher gasoline prices, just less rapid increases than they anticipated a month earlier. It does not mean they expect gasoline to become cheaper. Similarly, an unchanged food expectation does not imply stable grocery prices; it implies an unchanged expected rate of increase.
The categories should not be added together or averaged to recreate the overall inflation figure. Their questions and aggregation differ, and the list is not a complete consumer price index with official expenditure weights. The rent question is also not a forecast of a particular tenant's renewal notice. A household's actual exposure depends on its location, lease terms, insurance coverage, education plans and shopping choices.
The distinction helps explain why a broad inflation measure can look stable while day-to-day affordability remains a concern. Someone facing a lease renewal may focus on housing costs; someone buying fuel frequently may notice an easing in expected pump-price pressure. The survey does not identify which prices caused a specific respondent's overall outlook to change. It does show that the direction of expectations differed across major expenses.
Home-price expectations offered another contrast. Median anticipated home-price growth held at 3.0%, slightly below the series' trailing 12-month average of 3.1%. Home purchase prices and rents are separate questions covering different economic relationships. A stable expectation for property values cannot be treated as evidence that rent pressure is easing, just as higher expected rent does not establish that home values will accelerate.
A national employment worry is not an unemployment forecast
The most striking labor-market finding concerned the probability that national unemployment would be higher a year later. The mean of respondents' perceived probabilities increased by 1.4 percentage points to 45.3%, the highest reading since April 2020. The New York Fed attributed the increase to respondents without a college degree.
The wording is crucial. The 45.3% figure is not a projected unemployment rate, the share currently unemployed or necessarily the share of respondents saying unemployment will rise. It is an average of probabilities people assigned to that event. A person who sees a modest chance and another who sees a substantial chance both contribute to the mean. The measure captures the perceived likelihood of a direction of change, not its expected size.
The comparison with April 2020 is a statement about this survey series, not a declaration that current labor conditions resemble the pandemic shock. It does not measure the scale of layoffs people anticipate, how quickly unemployment might change or how deep any potential downturn could be. A high reading warrants attention, but attaching a historical economic scenario to it would go beyond the evidence.
Personal job prospects send a mixed signal
The average perceived chance of losing one's job over the following year increased by 0.4 percentage point to 13.9%. That deterioration was modest, and the level remained below its trailing 12-month average of 14.3%. In other words, the monthly change pointed toward greater concern, while the recent historical comparison was less alarming. Both facts belong in the same assessment.
At the same time, the mean perceived probability of finding a job if one's current job were lost rose by 0.4 percentage point to 46.5%, its highest level since November 2025. The survey's job-finding question is conditional: it asks about finding work after a hypothetical loss of the current job. It is not the current employment rate, nor a count of actual successful job searches.
There is no mathematical contradiction between those results. The chance of encountering a setback and the perceived ability to recover from it are different risks. A worker may feel a little less secure in an existing position yet believe that other employers would be more accessible if a search became necessary. National unemployment expectations can also deteriorate without moving every individual's assessment in the same direction.
The mean probability of voluntarily leaving a job declined by 0.5 percentage point to 19.4%, although it remained above the trailing 12-month average of 18.4%. This is an expected quit probability, not an observed quit rate. Read alongside the job-loss and job-finding responses, it suggests a labor outlook with several moving parts rather than a single signal of universal retreat.
Median expected earnings growth stayed at 2.6%, just below its trailing average of 2.7%. The survey's earnings question holds the job, employer and hours fixed, making it different from a forecast of all the income someone might receive after switching jobs or changing working hours. That design helps isolate expectations for pay in a continuing position, but limits the conclusions that can be drawn about a household's total future resources.
Income and spending expectations point to pressure, not an accounting deficit
Median expected household income growth edged down by 0.1 percentage point to 3.0%. The New York Fed said it had stayed within a narrow 2.8% to 3.1% range since June 2025. Expected spending growth declined by 0.2 percentage point to 5.3%, but remained above its trailing 12-month average of 5.0%.
The spending expectation exceeds the income expectation, which is relevant to the discussion of household pressure. But subtracting the two medians does not produce a forecast budget deficit for the typical family. The household at the median of one distribution need not be the household at the median of the other. The measures also describe growth rates rather than the dollar levels of income and expenses.
Spending can rise because prices increase, because a household buys more, because its composition changes or because an unusual expense occurs. These survey totals do not disentangle all those channels. A higher anticipated spending growth rate should not automatically be described as stronger real consumption, just as a positive income growth expectation does not guarantee an improvement in purchasing power.
It is also inappropriate to subtract the median inflation forecast from median earnings growth and call the result a measured real-wage change. Those are separate expectations with different definitions, populations and exposures. The contrast can motivate questions about affordability, but it cannot replace matched household data or realized wage and price statistics.
Debt-payment concerns deserve their own reading
The average perceived probability of missing a minimum debt payment over the next three months increased by 1.6 percentage points to 13.8%, its highest reading since December 2025. This is a shorter horizon than many of the survey's year-ahead questions, and it concerns a concrete financial obligation. Its deterioration is therefore a distinct signal, not merely another way of expressing inflation concern.
Still, 13.8% is not an observed delinquency rate. It is not a finding that this share of loan balances is already overdue or that precisely this share of households will miss a payment. It averages respondents' assessments of a future event. Actual delinquency data follow realized payments and typically use specific definitions of how late an account must be; the expectations survey asks a different question.
Perceptions of credit access relative to a year earlier, and expectations about future credit availability, were roughly unchanged. That leaves room for more payment anxiety even without a broad change in perceived access to borrowing. Access to credit and the ability to meet payments are related, but they are not interchangeable measures of financial health.
What the survey can tell decision-makers
Other results underscore the difference between probabilities and projected outcomes. The mean perceived chance that savings-account interest rates would be higher in a year rose by 1.3 percentage points to 31.6%, the highest since April 2023. That is not a forecast savings yield of 31.6%. The mean probability that U.S. stock prices would be higher in a year edged down by 0.2 percentage point to 40.0%; it is not an expected market return.
The survey is a nationally representative internet panel of about 1,300 household heads. Participants remain for up to 12 months, with people rotating in and out each month. Following respondents over time allows researchers to study changes in the same individuals' expectations, an advantage over a wholly new sample every month. It does not eliminate sampling uncertainty or make every small monthly movement economically decisive.
For businesses, the results identify questions worth testing against their own evidence: whether customers remain sensitive to essential expenses, whether workers feel cautious about switching roles and whether payment pressure is increasing. For policymakers, expectations offer information about how households perceive future conditions. Neither audience should treat the survey as a substitute for measured prices, employment, wages or payment performance.
The next useful comparison is therefore between these beliefs and subsequent evidence, while watching whether the patterns persist across later survey rounds. October's central message is specific: inflation expectations were stable, national employment worries increased, and household financial risk remained uneven. Preserving those distinctions gives the report more explanatory power than calling it simply reassuring or alarming.
Sources and methodology
Survey of Consumer Expectations, data and survey background
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