Inflation rate
Annual percentage change in consumer prices, measured by the consumer price index (CPI).
How it is measured
Statistical offices price a representative basket of goods and services monthly; the annual average change is the headline rate.
Where the number came from
Cost-of-living indices were built during and after the First World War to settle wage disputes: workers and employers needed an agreed answer to how much prices had risen. That adversarial origin still shapes the statistic, because a consumer price index is not a neutral scientific quantity but a rule about what to put in the basket and how to weight it, and the rule has money riding on it wherever pensions, wages or bond coupons are indexed to the result. The methodological arguments are correspondingly fierce. The 1996 Boskin Commission concluded that the US index overstated inflation by roughly a percentage point a year by failing to capture substitution and quality improvement, a finding worth hundreds of billions in indexed spending. Statistical offices have since adopted quality adjustment and more frequent reweighting, which means an inflation series is a moving methodological target as well as a moving economic one.
Worked example: Argentina at 220 percent, Switzerland at 0.15, and a year that does not match
Our table shows Argentina at about 219.9 percent, Switzerland at roughly 0.15 percent, Japan at about 3.2 percent, and the United States near 2.9 percent. The first thing to notice is not the spread but the years: the Argentine and American figures are 2024, while the Swiss and Japanese ones are 2025. Countries publish on their own schedules and some lag, so a headline inflation table almost always mixes vintages, and ours prints the year on every row rather than implying a common one. The second thing is that a number this large is doing different work from a number this small. At 220 percent, prices roughly triple within a year, the basket itself is being reweighted continuously as consumption patterns collapse and reform, and the resulting index is genuinely harder to interpret than a Swiss figure near zero. Argentina is also the standing example of the political risk in this field: between 2007 and 2015 its national statistics institute published inflation figures that the IMF formally censured as unreliable, and independent estimates ran several times higher. We publish the international series and say so, rather than quietly choosing a side.
Figures read from our own inflation rate table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG); IMF WEO for gaps.
Refresh cadence: Annual averages in our tables; taken from the latest source data on each rebuild.
What to watch for
Basket composition differs by country, and crisis economies (Venezuela, Argentina, Sudan) may have contested official numbers. Annual averages smooth over within-year spikes.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Inflation rate (consumer prices)" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).