The headline durable goods number tells you what Boeing did last month. The line the tape actually reads is nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, six words that strip out the two components that make the headline unreadable and leave the closest proxy the release has for future business investment.

What the headline captures, and why it swings

The Census Bureau’s advance report on durable goods manufacturers’ shipments, inventories, and orders covers new orders placed for goods intended to last three years or more. Aircraft, motor vehicles, defense equipment, machinery, computers, primary metals, and fabricated metals all sit inside. The transportation category alone runs roughly a third of the total, and inside transportation, nondefense aircraft and parts can move the headline by five to ten percentage points in a single month on a handful of large Boeing orders.

May 2026 was the clean example. Headline durable goods printed plus 8.9 percent month over month, the strongest monthly read in eleven months. Nondefense aircraft and parts orders alone printed plus 218 percent on the month. Strip transportation out, and the same release printed plus 0.2 percent.

Boeing sells jets in lumps, and each lump distorts the top-line print for one month before the base effect reverses. Reading the headline as a signal about the pace of manufacturing activity means reading Boeing’s order book, not the economy.

Ex-transportation and core capex are two different lines

The release publishes two ex-lumpiness cuts, and they are not interchangeable.

Ex-transportation removes the entire transportation category: aircraft, motor vehicles and parts, ships and boats, rail. It answers a narrower question, which is what the rest of the durable goods complex did once you set aircraft cycles and auto-plant retooling shutdowns aside. It is the cleanest headline-scrub the release offers.

Nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, the core capex line, cuts the sample further. It keeps only orders for business investment goods that private firms placed for themselves, and it strips both defense procurement (a government line the tape reads separately) and aircraft (the lumpy line). What is left is machinery, industrial equipment, computers, communications equipment, and electrical equipment ordered for private-sector production.

That is the read the desk carries into every GDP nowcast. New orders lead shipments by one to three months, and shipments are what the equipment-investment line of gross private domestic investment inside GDP actually captures.

Why the shipments twin matters as much as orders

The release publishes shipments alongside new orders, and the nondefense capital goods shipments excluding aircraft line is the direct input to the equipment-investment component of gross private domestic investment in the BEA’s Q2 GDP advance estimate. Orders tell the tape what capex is coming. Shipments tell the tape what capex already showed up in the quarter that is about to be estimated.

In practice, the desk reads three lines from the release in this order.

  1. Nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, the forward read on private business investment intentions.
  2. Nondefense capital goods shipments excluding aircraft, the direct feed into the current quarter’s GDP equipment-investment contribution.
  3. Unfilled orders in the core capex category, the backlog read that tells the tape how much of the current pipeline still has to be produced.

The headline number gets a glance to know whether Boeing had a good month. The three lines above get the read.

Reading the release cleanly

Three checks close the loop.

Compare against the recent range, not the prior month. Core capex orders move in a narrow band around zero on a month-over-month basis, and the tape reads the twelve-month trend more than the single monthly print. A plus 0.3 percent month-over-month print inside a plus 0.1 to plus 0.4 percent twelve-month band reads as continuation. A print outside that band in either direction is the story.

Watch for revisions to the prior month. The advance report gets revised by the full manufacturers’ shipments, inventories, and orders report two weeks later. A benign-looking current month with a large negative revision to the prior month is a weaker read than the current headline suggests.

Cross the core capex read with the ISM manufacturing new-orders sub-index and the S&P Global flash manufacturing PMI. All three lines measure the same underlying signal from different angles. Divergence between them is the tell that one is running noise. Convergence is the tell that the signal is real.

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