What's in the inflation basket? How the weights work, and why countries differ
Inflation follows prices weighted by household spending. Food is 15.4% of the euro-area basket and 27.4% of Romania's, so one price rise lands differently.
An inflation rate is an average of price changes, and the average is weighted. In 2026 the euro-area basket gives 15.4% of its weight to food and non-alcoholic drinks, 15.2% to transport, 14.6% to housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels, and 11.6% to restaurants and accommodation. Romania's basket gives 27.4% to food and only 3.7% to restaurants; Spain's gives 18.1% to restaurants. The same price rise therefore moves each country's inflation rate by a different amount.
A set of weights, not a shopping list
The "basket" is better read as a set of weights. What Eurostat publishes for the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is a classification of household spending and, for each category, a weight: its share of the money households spend. The 2026 weights for the euro area and every EU country are in Eurostat's item-weights table, prc_hicp_iw, last updated on 17 September 2026. For each country and year they add up to 1,000, so a weight of 154 means 15.4%.
The HICP covers purchases made inside a country's territory by households of any income, residents and visitors alike, which Eurostat calls the "domestic concept". Spending abroad by residents is outside it.
Two layers: categories with weights, products inside them
Each country's statistical office builds the index in two steps. The law requires an index for every category that makes up more than 0.1% of household final monetary consumption expenditure, and within each category the national statistical institute picks its own "national basket" of representative products. Each year the sample must take in products that have grown past one part per thousand of consumer spending and drop those that have fallen below it.
Germany's Federal Statistical Office shows what this looks like for its national consumer price index. The upper level holds about 700 types of goods and services, from salt and towels to cinema visits and rent, each with a weight. The lower level is the concrete products whose prices are collected, such as a pack of iodised salt, and it is adjusted constantly as products disappear and new variants arrive (Destatis, in German). Germany's national index keeps its weights fixed for five years, while the HICP updates them every year.
The euro-area basket in 2026
Since the January 2026 data the HICP has used a new European classification, ECOICOP version 2, aligned with the United Nations COICOP 2018. It has 13 main groups where the old one had 12: a new division for personal care, social protection and miscellaneous goods and services was added, information technology moved to "information and communication", and insurance and financial services were separated from other services. The table shows all 13 groups for the euro area and six countries.
| Share of the basket, 2026 (%) | Euro area | Germany | France | Italy | Spain | Poland | Romania |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Food and non-alcoholic beverages | 15.4 | 12.9 | 14.9 | 17.9 | 16.9 | 19.5 | 27.4 |
| Alcoholic beverages and tobacco | 3.6 | 3.3 | 3.5 | 3.0 | 3.3 | 6.5 | 5.8 |
| Clothing and footwear | 4.8 | 4.0 | 3.6 | 6.8 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 5.1 |
| Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels | 14.6 | 16.6 | 17.2 | 12.5 | 11.7 | 19.0 | 11.0 |
| Furnishings, household equipment and upkeep | 5.8 | 6.0 | 4.5 | 7.1 | 4.8 | 5.0 | 6.9 |
| Health | 5.9 | 8.3 | 4.8 | 4.0 | 4.9 | 6.8 | 8.9 |
| Transport | 15.2 | 16.7 | 15.4 | 16.0 | 14.8 | 12.1 | 12.7 |
| Information and communication | 3.8 | 3.6 | 4.2 | 3.0 | 3.6 | 4.6 | 5.2 |
| Recreation, sport and culture | 8.8 | 10.5 | 8.4 | 6.1 | 9.1 | 5.6 | 5.4 |
| Education | 1.1 | 1.0 | 0.9 | 1.0 | 1.5 | 0.9 | 4.0 |
| Restaurants and accommodation | 11.6 | 7.5 | 11.0 | 12.7 | 18.1 | 5.4 | 3.7 |
| Insurance and financial services | 3.0 | 3.4 | 4.3 | 2.8 | 2.2 | 3.7 | 0.4 |
| Personal care, social protection and other | 6.5 | 6.2 | 7.5 | 7.2 | 5.4 | 6.9 | 3.4 |
The euro area here is the 21 countries that use the euro in 2026. Columns are rounded, so they add to between 99.9 and 100.2. Narcotics are part of the classification but not of the HICP.
Why the same price change moves countries differently
An item's contribution to inflation is, to a first approximation, its weight times its price change. Eurostat computes contributions with a method that makes them add up to the headline, so a published contribution can differ a little from this arithmetic. In August 2026 euro-area energy prices were 14.3% above a year earlier on the site's data. With a weight of 9.0%, energy contributed about 1.3 points of that month's 3.2%, and Eurostat's published contribution is 1.29 points. (The September flash puts energy at 18.8%, but on 12 October 2026 Eurostat's contribution table ended at August.) Services (46.8% of the basket) contributed 1.43 points, food, alcohol and tobacco 0.22 and non-energy industrial goods 0.30.
The four standard aggregates weigh very differently by country:
| Share of the basket, 2026 (%) | Euro area | Germany | France | Italy | Spain | Poland | Romania |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Food, alcohol and tobacco | 18.9 | 16.2 | 18.4 | 20.9 | 20.2 | 26.0 | 33.2 |
| Energy | 9.0 | 8.9 | 8.7 | 10.9 | 8.8 | 12.2 | 11.5 |
| Non-energy industrial goods | 25.2 | 27.6 | 23.8 | 26.0 | 19.6 | 28.9 | 28.6 |
| Services | 46.8 | 47.4 | 49.1 | 42.2 | 51.4 | 32.9 | 26.7 |
| All items except energy, food, alcohol and tobacco | 72.0 | 74.9 | 72.9 | 68.1 | 70.9 | 61.8 | 55.3 |
Take a 10% rise in food, alcohol and tobacco prices with everything else unchanged. It adds about 1.9 points to euro-area inflation, 1.6 in Germany and 3.3 in Romania, where a third of the basket goes on these items. The mirror image holds for services: they are 51.4% of the Spanish basket and 26.7% of the Romanian one, so a rise in service prices matters about twice as much for the Spanish rate as for the Romanian one.
Restaurants and accommodation differ even more. Spain gives them 18.1%, almost five times Romania's 3.7%. Visitors are part of that weight, because the HICP counts spending inside the country by non-residents too, but not most of it: Spain's national consumer price index, which covers residents, gives the same group 17.0% (INE). Why Portuguese inflation follows the tourists shows a country where the visitor effect is larger.
How the weights are set and updated
The weights come from national accounts. The main source is household final monetary consumption expenditure, taken from the national accounts of one or two years earlier, supplemented by household budget surveys, sector statistics and other sources. Eurostat publishes new weights every year with the January data, and the January news release comes towards the end of February, later than in other months, to allow for the update.
Two cautions follow. The weights describe past spending, so a sudden shift in what people buy shows up in the basket only after the next update. And the January 2026 switch of classification is not like-for-like with earlier years: games of chance (lotteries, betting, gaming) entered the HICP that January, at 1.3% of the euro-area basket (from under 0.1% in Ireland to 3.1% in Cyprus), and the reference year of the index moved from 2015 to 2025. The headline rate was deliberately left unchanged in the back series; the ECB notes that the only differences, up to 0.1 point in the euro-area annual rate, come from rounding when the reference year moved.
What is not in the basket
Eurostat lists the categories the HICP does not cover: narcotics, imputed rentals for housing (the notional rent that owner-occupiers pay themselves), prostitution, life insurance, public insurance connected with health, and the indirectly measured financial services known as FISIM. For the cost of a home itself, the HICP counts only actual rents (5.8% of the euro-area basket in 2026; 7.5% in Germany and France, 0.6% in Romania); the notional rent of owner-occupiers, and interest paid under credit arrangements such as a mortgage, are outside it. House prices, rents and inflation explains what that does to the number, and HICP vs CPI explains why national indices that include owner-occupied housing can differ.
The weights describe all households together, "irrespective of their income" in Eurostat's words. A household that spends a larger share than the average on food or fuel has different weights, and so its own inflation rate differs from the published one.
Reading this on euroflation
Every country page on this site shows the HICP rate for that country's own basket, so differences in baskets are part of why Germany, Spain and Romania can report different rates for the same month. The euro-area page shows the aggregate, with the energy, food and services components behind it, and the country ranking lines them up. For the food component specifically, see food inflation vs headline inflation.
The short version
- The "basket" is a set of weights: each category's share of household spending, 13 main groups in 2026.
- Weights are set from national accounts and surveys and updated every January, so they differ by country: food is 15.4% of the euro-area basket, 27.4% in Romania and 12.9% in Germany.
- A price rise moves inflation by roughly its weight times its size: energy at 9.0% of the euro-area basket and up 14.3% contributed 1.29 points in August 2026.
- Owner-occupied housing, narcotics and a few financial items are not covered.
Source: Eurostat, HICP item weights (prc_hicp_iw, ECOICOP version 2, 2026 weights, updated 17 September 2026), HICP contributions to euro-area annual inflation (prc_hicp_ctr, August 2026) and HICP annual rates (prc_hicp_minr); Eurostat HICP reference metadata (prc_hicp_esms); Eurostat's information note and Q&A on the 2026 classification change; ECB Economic Bulletin 3/2026, box "What's new in the HICP?"; Destatis. Retrieved 12 October 2026. euroflation is an independent tracker and is not affiliated with the ECB, Eurostat or the EU. Nothing here is financial advice.