Inflation has been cooling for two years, and fresh data released Thursday showed that trend continued in September: Prices climbed just 2.1% compared with a year earlier.

That is nearly back to the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation goal — good news for both the Fed and the White House. It is also slower than the previous reading, which stood at 2.3%.

Still, the report also shows evidence that price increases remain stickier under the surface.

A closely watched inflation measure that strips out volatile food and fuel costs to give a sense of the underlying trend in prices was up 2.7% in September compared with a year earlier. That “core” inflation figure was unchanged from the previous reading, a sign that it was proving slow to cool. And on a monthly basis, core inflation actually accelerated slightly.

While the figures were largely in line with what economists had expected, the stubbornness in core inflation reinforced that the Fed’s campaign to wrestle price increases back under control was not entirely finished.

“All in all, this is a relatively good report,” said Omair Sharif, founder of the firm Inflation Insights. But he added that he thought core inflation could remain too quick for comfort in coming months, before fading more completely early next year.

“It’s not a mission accomplished kind of number,” he said.

The Fed lifted interest rates sharply in 2022 and early 2023 to try to slow the economy and wrestle inflation under control. But officials slashed them by half a percentage point in September, cutting interest rates for the first time in four years.

Given how much inflation has been slowing, central bankers decided they no longer needed to hit the brakes on the economy so aggressively. In fact, doing so risked slowing it down too much, potentially even causing an economic crash.

Now, policymakers are widely expected to lower rates by a quarter point at their meeting next week. But Sharif said that sticky inflation in the coming months could make a follow-up rate cut at the Fed’s December meeting more of a judgment call.Still, “this is an economy that the Fed should feel good about,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. The report also showed that consumers had been spending at a rapid clip in September, even after adjusting for inflation, a sign that they remained “remarkably resilient.”

And even if price increases are not yet completely vanquished, the progress in lowering them is undeniable. Overall inflation peaked above 7% in 2022. The consumer price index, a related inflation measure that comes out earlier each month, touched 9.1% that year.

That’s good news for the Biden administration — and in particular for Vice President Kamala Harris — as November’s election enters its final days. As price increases cool, people seem to be slowly feeling better about the economy. Consumer confidence has been improving, though it has yet to fully recover to the levels that prevailed before the pandemic.

“While critics said we needed a recession to lower inflation, instead inflation has come down while our economy has grown” substantially, President Joe Biden said in a statement after the report’s release.

Cooler inflation could translate to more optimism at the voting booth when it comes to Democrats and their recent management of the economy.

So could continued wage gains. The job market has been slowing over the past year, though wage growth has remained fairly strong.

Fresh employment cost index data released Thursday showed that compensation climbed 0.8% in the third quarter, just slightly slower than what economists had expected. Over the past year, compensation for civilian workers climbed 3.9% — a moderation, but still a solid pace of growth.

That was the first reading below 4% since 2021, Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, said in an email after the report’s release.

Gradually cooling wage growth could actually be welcome news for Fed officials. It suggests that the labor market remains solid, but not so hot that it might fuel further inflation, which could happen if employers are trying to cover climbing labor costs by charging more.

“While wage growth remains above historical levels, the cooling trend over the last couple of years is clear,” Stahle said. “Even as wage growth has slowed, it remains higher than the pace of inflation, giving a meaningful boost to workers’ purchasing power.”