Transparency

Sources & methodology

This site adds nothing to the data except presentation and a few clearly described calculations. It stores no figures, estimates nothing and fills no gaps.

How your personal rate is calculated

Eurostat publishes, every month, how much prices have changed over a year in each of 13 spending categories, and how much the average household spends on each. Your personal rate is the average of the 13 category rates, weighted by the shares you set. With the average household's shares the result is close to the official rate but not always identical, because the official index is chain-linked and built from hundreds of detailed items. Categories without a published rate that month are left out and the page says so.

How the time machine works

It divides the latest monthly index by the average index of the year you choose. Only complete years (twelve published months) are offered. It measures consumer prices, not wages or asset prices.

The rules this site follows

Every figure is fetched live from Eurostat and shown with the month it refers to.
Provisional and estimated figures are flagged as such.
If Eurostat does not answer, the page says so rather than showing a partial or stale number as if it were current.

Sources

Eurostat — HICP, monthly indices and rates of change (prc_hicp_minr)

The HICP is the EU's harmonised measure. It can differ from a country's own national CPI (for example, it excludes owner-occupiers' housing costs such as mortgage interest).

Published by: Eurostat (European Commission), compiled from national statistical institutes
Used for: Annual rates by spending category (calculator, price movers) and the all-items index, 2015 = 100 (time machine).
Freshness: Published monthly, mid-month; re-read at most every 6 hours.
Licence: Reuse authorised with acknowledgement of the source (Eurostat copyright policy, CC BY 4.0)

Eurostat — HICP item weights (prc_hicp_iw)

Weights describe the average of all households in a country, including tourists' spending there — no real household matches them exactly.

Published by: Eurostat (European Commission)
Used for: The average household's spending shares that the calculator starts from; filtering small items on the movers page.
Freshness: Updated once a year; re-read at most every 6 hours.
Licence: Reuse authorised with acknowledgement of the source (Eurostat copyright policy, CC BY 4.0)

Privacy

No accounts, no cookies, no ads. The spending shares you set stay in your browser and are never sent anywhere. The only measurement is anonymous page-speed data from Vercel Speed Insights, sampled on about one visit in two: load times and the page address, with no cookies and no personal identifier.