Consumer price inflation basket of goods and services: 2026

• In 2026, 27 items have been added to the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH) basket and 19 items have been removed, resulting in a total of 760 items.

• The same changes have been made to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) baskets.

• Additions include houmous, alcohol-free beer, pet grooming, motorhomes and dashboard cameras.

• Removals include sheets of wrapping paper, and bottled premium lager bought in pubs and restaurants.

The basket contents for 2026 are summarised in Annexes A and B of the accompanying dataset, and the changes from last year are discussed in this article and listed in Tables 2 and 3 of the same dataset. The article describes the updating of items whose prices are collected in-store and online, though it refers to the grocery scanner data that is being used from the February 2026 index.

The shopping basket

Consumer price inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise or fall. Imagine a large "shopping basket" containing those goods and services. As the prices of the items change, so does the total cost of the basket. Movements in consumer price indices represent this change.

Within each calendar year, the basket contents are fixed so that changes reflect only changes in prices, and not variations in the quality and quantity of items purchased.

However, the basket contents and associated expenditure weights are updated annually. This is important to avoid potential biases that might otherwise develop, for example, because of the development of new goods and services. These procedures also help to ensure that the indices reflect longer-term trends in consumer spending.

Changes to the items and associated weights are introduced in the February index each year, but prices are collected for both old and new items in January. This means that the figures for each year can be "chain-linked" to form a long-run price index spanning many years. In other words, price changes between December and January are based on the old basket, while price changes between January and subsequent months are based on the new basket.

From the February 2026 index (to be published on 25 March 2026), we will introduce groceries scanner data into our consumer price inflation statistics. Scanner data will cover approximately 50% of the groceries market, with the remainder continuing to be covered through the existing in-store and online collections.

There are many benefits to using scanner data, including improved product and geographical coverage, improved ability to capture price variation within a month, inclusion of more discount types, and more granular expenditure information.

More information on our use of scanner data is available in our Overview of how we use scanner data in consumer price inflation statistics; January 2026 article. The effect of using the data is described in our Impact analysis on transformation of UK consumer price statistics: January 2026 article.

Representative items

For grocery scanner data, we have information on the full range of products sold by the scanner retailers. However, for traditional data collection in-store and online, a sample of specific goods and services must be selected that gives a reliable measure of price movements overall.

Several factors are considered when choosing these representative items, including:

• ease of finding and pricing the product

• availability throughout the year

• amount spent on a particular item or group of items

• variability of prices within a class

• an analysis of the balance across the basket

The allocation of items to groups can be analysed using a combination of weight and variability to help decide whether more items are needed in a particular part of the basket. Table 1 includes summary information.

This analysis cannot tell us which items should be priced, so choosing a set to represent each area remains a matter of judgement.

Various sources of information are used when reviewing the baskets, including our Living Costs and Food Survey, market research data, trade journals and press reports. Changes in retailing are also reported by the price collectors.

The basket contents should be interpreted only as representative items used in estimating consumer price changes. Additions and removals should not be viewed as a simple indicator of increased or reduced popularity.

Timing of changes

Changes to the baskets are being introduced with the February 2026 consumer price statistics to be published on 25 March 2026.

Additions

Several additions to the traditional data collection this year are influenced by the use of grocery scanner data provided by some large retailers. The grocery items that have been added are being used to represent prices paid in stores not providing scanner data and will be merged with that information when producing the indices for "consumption segments". These are broader groupings of products than the items used in traditional collection and reflect the fact that we have near-complete coverage of grocery expenditure categories for each scanner retailer. The new items have been added where we have scanner data but no equivalent price information for other retailers.

For example, croissants have been added to the baskets and their prices merged with scanner data in a consumption segment representing "pastries and similar breakfast bakery products". Adding this popular product will improve representation of price movements for breakfast items.

Similarly, baby food has been reintroduced to diversify the range of products collected. It will be combined with scanner data in a "baby food and drinks" consumption segment. The item was previously removed from the basket in 2010.

Non-alcoholic beer has been added for the first time to represent an uncovered area of the alcohol market. Sales have increased over recent years, as has the product range and shelf-space devoted to the product. The new item will be combined with scanner data in a "beer, low and non-alcoholic" consumption segment.

Other changes related to the adoption of scanner data include narrowing the definition of an existing spray oil item to exclude olive oil, and splitting an existing take-away sandwich item based on where it is purchased, with sandwiches purchased in supermarkets combined with scanner data.

Aside from groceries and scanner data, developments in technology influence the basket updates. For example, dashboard cameras have been introduced for 2026. Expenditure on this item has reportedly increased over recent years, reaching around £150 million in 2023 and estimated to rise further, as consumers look to lower their insurance costs and provide parking security.

Several new items have been introduced to represent specific markets where consumer spending is significant or growing, and existing items may not adequately represent price changes. For example, pet grooming has been added to reflect a growing area of the pet care market. Reports indicate that this service attracts the second-highest spend in the sector behind health checks, which we already cover with the inclusion of annual booster injections.

Some new items have been introduced to diversify the range of products collected for already established groupings. For example, motorhomes have been introduced alongside the caravan price collection. Research indicates that motorhomes attract a significant share and expenditure in this area.

In other cases, new items are direct replacements for the same or similar products. For example, we are replacing several children's clothing items to anticipate an update to the international classification system used to analyse the data. The new classification distinguishes clothing by sex so that, for example, children's socks have been replaced by separate items for boys' and girls' socks, and trousers suitable for school have been replaced by boys' trousers.

Finally, analysis of the broad balance of representative items across CPIH identified a need to strengthen our coverage of vegetables, with houmous being added to address this. Reports highlight increasing popularity of this item among health-conscious consumers, with estimates of expenditure rising to around £170 million in 2024.

Removals

Growth in the overall size of the baskets is limited each year to manage production costs and processing times. As a result, several items were removed in 2026. In some cases, this addressed over-representation within certain areas, with analysis showing there was scope to remove items without any significant loss of precision in the estimates. Restaurants and cafes was one such category, with premium bottled lager removed, where other alcohol items were sufficiently representative of price movements.

New World and European white wines were previously two separate items but have been merged into one item covering off-sales of white wine. Again, this aims to rebalance the baskets, reduce coverage in some areas, and free up resources to improve it in others.

In other cases, items have been removed to make way for new additions within the same grouping. For example, sheets of wrapping paper have been replaced by rolls of wrapping paper. Collectors have reported difficulties in pricing individual sheets, so moving to rolls better reflects availability in the gift-wrap sector.

Some centrally collected items are priced based on the position in bestseller charts as opposed to pricing a specific product across time. The aim is to mitigate against any downward bias that could occur as a product ages, but a disadvantage is that it can result in a more volatile price series because of changes in chart composition.

These chart items include computer games bought online and computer game downloads. To reduce the volatility and aid interpretation of the data, prices for the two items are being collected twice per month from 2026, in index week and the following week.

Similarly, prices of overnight hotel accommodation can be volatile depending on short-term demand and availability of rooms to price. From 2026, hotel prices previously collected six weeks in advance are being collected for two separate nights each month, in index week and the following Thursday, with the second date sufficiently far from index day that any event-specific volatility would have passed. To help manage collection costs, the overnight hotel accommodation item priced the day before the overnight stay has been removed from the basket.