What happened to the series
The harmonised European consumer price index is the number every market read quotes. From 2026 it moves to a new base year and a new classification, and Eurostat closed the old series to make the change: the final month published on the previous basis is December 2025. All eleven dataflows we read carry the same closing timestamp.
The rebased series is not in the dissemination API. There is no new dataflow and no 2026 data under any of the classification codes in the existing one. This is not a collection failure at our end; the number has not been published.
The series did not get worse. It stopped.
What we did about it
Cadence holds the December 2025 figure for every market and declines to publish it. It appears in the edition flagged with its period and its age in months, and nowhere in a read. A nine-month-old reading printed beside current figures is not a stale number; it is a wrong one, because the reader will assume it belongs to the same quarter as everything around it.
We looked for a substitute and did not take one. National CPI from the OECD reaches August 2026 for Germany and stops at December 2025 for the other ten, so adopting it would buy one market out of eleven, on a different index, and leave the comparison between them meaningless.
One market out of eleven, on a different index, is not a European read. It is a European-shaped gap with one corner filled in.
Why this is worth saying out loud
Every quarterly market read being written right now faces the same hole. Some will quote the December figure without its date. Some will substitute a national index without saying which. Some will say nothing and let the absence pass for a decision.
The question worth asking of any Q3 European read that contains an inflation number is simply which of those three it did — and whether the document tells you.
What this does not establish
This is a statement about a published series, not about prices. Nothing here says European inflation rose, fell or held; we do not know, and that is the point. When Eurostat publishes the rebased series, Cadence will read it and the withholding will lift on its own.
Source: Eurostat HICP, final month published 2025-12, checked across all eleven market dataflows. A read, not a forecast.