New orders for durable goods rose 1.1 percent in July, and the line that strips out aircraft rose 0.2
The headline and the line underneath it disagree, and the whole of the disagreement is aircraft.
New orders for manufactured durable goods rose $3.6 billion or 1.1 percent in July, to $339.3 billion, the Census Bureau said in the advance report it released at 8:30 this morning under number CB 26-134. That follows a 0.5 percent rise in June and is the fourth increase in five months. Strip out transportation and the rise is 0.4 percent. Strip out defense instead and it is 1.3 percent.
Transportation equipment supplied $2.6 billion of the $3.6 billion, rising 2.3 percent to $116.2 billion after two consecutive monthly falls. Inside that category one line did most of the work. New orders for nondefense aircraft and parts rose 12.7 percent to $19.8 billion, which is $2.2 billion of the month's whole increase. Motor vehicles and parts, a far larger line at $73.9 billion, rose 0.9 percent.
Read that aircraft figure against the year rather than the month. Orders for nondefense aircraft and parts run to $146.0 billion so far in 2026 against $186.6 billion over the same period of 2025, a fall of 21.8 percent, and a monthly total in this category turns on individual contracts the report does not identify.
The capital goods line
For business investment the series to read is nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft, and it rose 0.2 percent to $85.9 billion, after 1.7 percent in June. Including aircraft, nondefense capital goods orders rose 2.0 percent to $99.1 billion. Defense capital goods orders fell 1.5 percent to $23.0 billion.
Computers and electronic products went backwards. New orders fell 1.1 percent to $30.7 billion and shipments fell 1.2 percent to $34.3 billion, in the category that led June's increase. One qualification belongs on that pair, and it is the Census Bureau's own: the figures on new and unfilled orders exclude semiconductor manufacturing.
The backlog and the shelves
Shipments rose $3.2 billion or 1.0 percent to $334.7 billion, a tenth increase in eleven months. Unfilled orders rose $9.6 billion or 0.6 percent to $1,599.9 billion and have now risen in twenty-four of the last twenty-five months, with transportation equipment accounting for $1,006.4 billion of that backlog. Inventories rose 0.4 percent to $604.4 billion, a tenth consecutive monthly rise, led by primary metals at $51.9 billion, a line that has now risen for seventeen months in a row.
June was revised up. New orders across all manufacturing industries are now recorded at $657.7 billion against the $656.5 billion first published, with shipments revised to $653.5 billion and total inventories close to unchanged.
Two cautions sit in the explanatory notes and both do real work here. The advance report is not built on a probability sample, so the agency computes no sampling error and no confidence interval, and it marks every percentage change to say that statistical significance is not measurable. A 0.2 percent move sits well inside the range where that matters. Separately, the Census Bureau states that revised historical data and the seasonal adjustment models for this survey will remain unchanged for the remainder of 2026, which it attributes to schedule and resource constraints.
The fuller estimates, including nondurable goods, arrive on 2 September. The August advance report is due on 25 September.
