Consumer prices accelerated last month on a wide range of items, from food to health care to hotel rooms, nudging the overall rate of inflation a bit higher than expected.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that overall inflation climbed 0.2 percent in January after a rise of 0.4 percent in December. And a less volatile measure of consumer prices that excludes energy and food costs rose 0.3 percent last month after climbing 0.1 percent in December.

Investors on Wall Street, who were expecting that inflation would rise at a slower rate, reacted to the new data by pushing stock prices lower. In afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index were trading off Tuesday’s closing levels, while the Nasdaq composite index was up slightly.

The new price report also stung Wall Street because it came a week after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, told Congress that he expected inflation to settle down this year. Those remarks helped push the stock market to record levels.

But the inflation data contained a few bright spots. Even though inflation rose last month, it did so at a slower pace than in December, making paychecks for the average worker go a little further. Wages for workers in non-supervisory positions rose 2.1 percent last month after inflation is taken into account. Inflation-adjusted wages rose 1.7 percent in December.

Price increases also slowed in certain categories. Housing costs rose 0.2 percent last month after climbing 0.4 percent in December. And energy prices actually fell 1.5 percent. In December they rose 4.2 percent.  Still, prices are quite a distance from settling down to a level that will put the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee at ease. The closely watched “core” rate of inflation rose 2.7 percent from a year earlier, well above the 1 percent to 2 percent the Fed typically likes to see. That reversed a four-month trend during which the year-over-year core inflation rate fell or remained flat. After climbing as high as 2.9 percent in September, year-over-year core inflation fell to 2.6 percent in November and December.

“Inflation has been running above the top of the F.O.M.C.’s comfort zone for so long now that it appears the F.O.M.C. has grown comfortable with being uncomfortable over core inflation,” Richard F. Moody, chief economist of Mission Residential, a real estate investment firm, wrote in a research note. “One has to wonder how long core inflation will be allowed to drift on the high side of the F.O.M.C.’s comfort zone before the F.O.M.C. takes action in the form of further hikes in the Fed funds rate.”

A sharp rise in the prices of medical care and tobacco helped elevate inflation in January, leading some economists to conclude that a number of temporary factors are exaggerating the numbers.   “At first sight, the jump in January core consumer price inflation seems to signal renewed inflationary vigor,” said Kenneth Beauchemin, an economist with Global Insight. But Mr. Beauchemin pointed out that the price increase for medical care in January rose at the fastest pace since 1991.

Joshua Shapiro, chief economist with MFR, said the data was “Hardly the stuff that is likely to cause the Fed to throw up its collective hands in horror.”