According to the Labor Department, the rate of increase in prices, or inflation, was 3.4% during the course of the year.
It increased more quickly throughout the month than many analysts had predicted, rising from 3.1% in November.
The number is probably going to make the US Federal Reserve wary of announcing that it has defeated inflation.
Up until this summer, the US Federal Reserve had been hiking interest rates to curb price increases in order to meet its 2% inflation target.
The most recent inflation data are “not bad numbers, but they do show that disinflation progress is still slow and unlikely to be a straight line down,” according to Principal Asset Management chief global strategist Seema Shah.
Since peaking, inflation in the largest economy in the world has drastically decreased.
