Consumer price index from 2026

5. Publication in practice

At the start of the 2025=100 series, CPI figures from the January 2025 reporting month onwards will be published on the basis of the new methods for bungalow parks, package holidays and games of chance. In addition, figures dating back to the year 2010 have been calculated. For the HICP, figures have been calculated back to the year 1996. These figures will become available in February 2026. The HICP will be rescaled to 2025=100, and the Dutch HICP figures based on ECOICOP v.2 will be available on the CBS website with immediate effect. The figures for other European countries and for the Euro area and the EU as a whole, based on ECOICOP v.2, are published by the countries and by Eurostat itself. In practice, not all groups, classes and subclasses in ECOICOP v.2 are calculated and published. A group, class or subclass is excluded from publication if there is limited spending on it in the Netherlands and the group would therefore have a very low weighting. Neither is an ECOICOP v.2 group, class or subclass published if spending falls outside the scope of the index. A definitive list of the groups, classes and subclasses to be published will be made available on the CBS website during 2025.

Revision strategy

The figures for the CPI and HICP are published shortly after the reporting month. Sometimes these figures may be revised as additional information becomes available. In such instances, the revised figures are announced as definitive or revised. When there is a change in the method used to produce the statistics, the figures published before and after that change will not always be fully aligned and comparable. Particularly when the seasonal pattern of certain figures changes, this may have important implications.

In the HICP, methodological changes are generally introduced in December of a given year, meaning that the price changes between December and January are the first to be calculated using the new method. The calculation of year-on-year changes in the index is then based on two methods for the subsequent 12 months. In some cases, a country may choose to recalculate the previous year’s figures using the new method and to revise the HICP series for a period of 12 months.  New inflation rates will then be based on the figures calculated using one method, but the previous year's revised indices will not be fully comparable to those of two years ago. This approach will be applied for bungalow parks and package holidays. As a result, the monthly inflation figure will change over the course of 2025. In such instances, the CPI will be based on a different method, whereby two sets of figures will remain available for (at least) one year, and year-to-year changes will be the result of indices calculated using the same method. In concrete terms, this means that the 2015=100 series will remain available, and will be calculated using the same method in 2025 as it was in 2024. In addition, the 2025=100 series will include figures for 2025 that have been calculated using the new methods introduced for 2026 onwards. This will apply to bungalow parks, package holidays and games of chance.

Recalculation of the results 

As described in the previous sections, in the 2025=100 series, certain methods and classifications will change with respect to previous series. To enable comparability across longer time series, the CPI figures from 2010 to 2025 have been recalculated using the new methods and classifications wherever possible. The results based on the old methods and classifications (up to and including the year 2025) will remain available in the archive of the StatLine database.

For the 2025=100 series, the following applies:

Completely new figures based on the new methods and classifications will be calculated and published for the year 2025.

For the years 2010 to 2024, all items included in the CPI will be recoded from the old ECOICOP classification to the new ECOICOP v.2 classification. The weighting factors and (unpublished) index series for each article will be unchanged. Next, all items will again be aggregated according to the new ECOICOP v.2 subclasses, classes, groups and divisions. Finally, all the figures will be rescaled to 2025=100. The figures at the level of divisions, groups and classes may therefore vary, but the trend for the CPI as a whole between 2010 and 2024 in the new series will be the same as in the old series, with the exception of some rounding differences.

No indices dating back further than 2010 have been calculated for the CPI. For the HICP, these series will be made available in order to deal with changes and time series consistently across the EU. The required item-level source data is no longer available for recoding and new aggregation. In order to calculate the HICP indices for the years 1996 to 2009, a different method will be applied due to the lack of item-level data. The most detailed COICOP subclasses have been recoded based on the new ECOICOP v.2 subclasses as best as possible according to the old classification. The time series published in early 2026, including at the most detailed level, can be considered the best possible estimate for the 1996-2009 period, but the less accurate method of classification does have a detrimental on quality.