Special Report
Missing and Revised Economic Data
During the 2025 funding lapse, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) combined scheduled releases for GDP and for personal income and outlays. Census's services-survey documentation recorded suspended sample maintenance and omitted benchmarking revisions. Separate annual updates changed retail coverage and the detail in BEA's investment tables. The examples concern both the publication of a statistic and the data and methods used to produce it.
Delayed releases
On December 23, 2025, BEA published its initial GDP estimate for the third quarter of 2025. This report took the place of the advance estimate scheduled for October 30 and the second estimate scheduled for November 26. BEA attributed delays in many principal GDP source datasets to the lapse in federal appropriations during October and November.
The initial estimate combined data and methods that BEA normally uses for its advance and second quarterly estimates. For that quarter, the December report replaced both scheduled reports rather than simply moving the advance estimate to a later date.
Estimated inputs
BEA's January 22, 2026 personal income and outlays report covered October and November 2025 together. It replaced releases scheduled for November 26 and December 19, 2025, following the funding lapse. The combined report also described how BEA supplied missing October price inputs.
For seasonally adjusted October price indexes, BEA used the geometric mean of the September and November consumer price indexes, or CPIs. To derive indexes without seasonal adjustment, BEA applied October 2024 seasonal adjustment factors to the imputed seasonally adjusted October 2025 values.
Revisions and benchmarking
In its June 26, 2025 third estimate of first-quarter GDP, BEA revised real GDP down by 0.3 percentage point from the second estimate. Consumer spending and exports were revised down, with a downward revision to imports partly offsetting them. The largest contributor to the consumer-spending revision was services. BEA linked revisions in recreation and transportation services to new and revised first-quarter data from the Census Bureau's Quarterly Services Survey. Revisions in other services, led by international travel, used revised data from BEA's International Transactions Accounts. Updated international transactions data also accounted for most of the revisions to exports and imports.
Census calls its revision of previously published quarterly services estimates benchmarking. Its services-survey documentation, revised February 20, 2026, says quarterly sample maintenance was suspended for the fourth quarter of 2025 because of the funding lapse. Benchmarking revisions were also omitted in that quarter because of both the funding lapse and survey integration into the Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES). The documentation said revisions incorporating historical corrections, new seasonal factors and results of the 2023 and 2024 AIES would be released later.
Changing survey coverage
Census's monthly retail methodology describes sales and end-of-month inventory estimates drawn from the Monthly Retail Trade Survey. Each month, firms in the sample are asked to report sales and inventory data for the month just ending. Census computes totals from weighted reported and imputed data and benchmarks those totals to the latest available annual survey totals.
Previously, firms without paid employees, called nonemployers, entered the monthly estimates through a benchmarking adjustment factor. Beginning with the April 2025 annual revision report, Census removed nonemployers from the estimates and the historical series to align them with AIES.
The main release of 2023 AIES data was published on February 26, 2026. It included business revenue, expenses, payroll and employment at national, regional and divisional levels, with state estimates for selected sectors. Census said the estimates were not adjusted for price changes and could be subject to sampling variability and other errors.
Annual updates
BEA's September 30, 2026 annual update covered the National Income and Product Accounts and the Industry Economic Accounts. For the first time, the annual update of the Regional Economic Accounts was published on the same day. BEA attributed the coordinated publication to improvements in concurrent production and publication of its statistics. Improvements in the national update affected all three sets of accounts. The national update period ran from the first quarter of 2021 through the first quarter of 2026. Revised estimates incorporated newly available and revised source data and improved estimation methods. Updated seasonal adjustment factors also entered the quarterly and monthly measures.
BEA's 2025 annual-update account described a separate expansion of published detail for office investment. NIPA table family 5.4 separates data centers from general, financial and other offices, with the detail beginning in the first quarter of 2020. The data-center investment estimates use Census construction spending data from its Value Put in Place Survey.