A household's basket, in 2022
Romania · one dot = one leu out of every 1,000
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Each dot is one thousandth of an ordinary basket: one leu out of 1,000.
The thousand dots are the real 2022 spending structure of a Romanian household — 335 on food, 157 on housing, water and energy, the rest split across eleven other categories. Food alone accounts for a third of the basket.
The basket's weight is not what matters — what a category's prices actually did is.
Recount the same dots by how much each category contributed to 2022's 14.1% inflation, and the categories rank completely differently. Food climbs from 335 to 485 dots, housing from 157 to 241. Communications, 54 dots in the basket, nearly disappear: 3.
The same official rate of 14.1%, but not the same year for everyone.
Pick a household profile and the canvas rebuilds with its basket, recounted against the same 2022 inflation. A farmer, who spends far more on food, felt 17.1% — +3.0 points above average. An employee stayed closest to the official rate.
Move the dial and the canvas resettles for each year.
Housing drove nearly a quarter of 2022's price rise, then collapsed to almost nothing in 2023, when energy prices were capped — and climbed back in 2025–2026, as the cap was lifted. Food stays, every year, among the top two categories.
What moved
Two counts, one basket
A picture of the consumption basket says where the money usually goes. It does not say what actually got more expensive. Those are two different questions, and in the year of record inflation they give two different pictures.
The first count is the basket's weight: out of every 1,000 lei a Romanian household spent in 2022, 335 went on food, 157 on housing, water and energy. That is the ordinary family budget — and how any article about "what Romanians spend their money on" gets written.
The second asks who drove the price rise. A category's basket weight, multiplied by its annual price change, gives its real contribution to 2022's 14.1% inflation. Food, which rose 22.7%, climbs from 335 to 485 dots — nearly half of the whole year's price rise. Housing, up 24.0%, climbs from 157 to 241.
Categories that barely rose in price nearly vanish from the second count, however large they were in the basket. Communications is the clearest case.
Communications were 54 dots of the ordinary basket — more than health or furnishings. Their prices barely moved in 2022, so, recounted, they fall to 3 dots. Not because Romanians gave up phones or internet, but because that category simply did not contribute to the price rise.
Transport takes the opposite path, more mildly: 70 dots in the basket, 44 in contribution — it rose, but not as much as food or energy.
Category by category
Thirteen rows, two orders
The basket's thirteen categories give two different rankings, depending on how you sort them: by budget share, or by share of the price rise.
The bar shows size relative to the top position. Weights are from the family budget survey (INS, ABF), year 2022; contribution is that same weight multiplied by the category's annual price change (IAPC102).
Same rate, different basket
Your household is not the average household
The official 2022 inflation rate was 14.1%, calculated on the whole population's average basket. Every type of household has a different basket, though, and the same annual price changes, applied to a different basket, give a different personal rate.
national average personal rate annual inflation, 2022, on each household profile's basket
Farmers had the highest personal rate, 17.1% — +3.0 points above average — because food and energy, the two categories that rose the most, are also the largest shares of their basket. Pensioners had almost the same rate, 16.2%, driven by health and housing. Employees stayed closest to the official rate, at 15.3% — +1.2 points — because their basket is closer to the average the official rate actually measures.
Nobody had a rate below the national average in 2022. That year, the price rise affected exactly the categories everybody buys, regardless of profile — only the proportion changed.
How we counted
Method and limits
Basket weights come from the Romanian National Institute of Statistics' family budget survey, TEMPO-Online table BUF109I, total consumption expenditure structure by COICOP category, main social category and area of residence. Annual price changes come from IAPC102, harmonised consumer price indices by ECOICOP version 2 group, extracted on 9 September 2026.
A category's contribution to a given year's inflation is simple: its weight in the previous year's basket, multiplied by that category's annual price change. The sum of all thirteen contributions approximates the officially published rate but does not reproduce it exactly — the official aggregate index is built by chaining monthly indices, not by a simple annual weighted sum. For 2022, the sum of contributions in this canvas comes to 15.65 percentage points, against the official 14.12%.
The thousand dots are apportioned by the largest-remainder method, so every canvas totals exactly a thousand. Household profiles — employee, pensioner, farmer, unemployed, urban, rural — come from the same survey, but its 2024 edition, the latest published by social category; they are applied to each selected year's own price changes, not to their own historical spending structure.
Three limits that matter
The current classification starts in 2020. INS only moved to the current COICOP classification of spending categories then; earlier years cannot be directly compared against these thirteen categories, so the canvas covers only 2021–2026.
Household profiles are fixed. A farmer's or a pensioner's spending structure is not recalculated separately for every year; it is the 2024 survey's structure, with only the chosen year's price change varying. The real difference between profiles, year to year, may be slightly larger or smaller than the canvas shows.
2026 is an unfinished year. The latest figure available for 2026 is from June; that year's recount compares June against June, not December against December like the others.
Every number is recalculated directly from the INS tables cited below; the calculation script is kept alongside the raw data.
Sources
What we read
- National Institute of Statistics (Romania), TEMPO-Online, BUF109I — Structure of total household consumption expenditure, by expenditure category, social category and area of residence, table, extracted 9 September 2026.
- National Institute of Statistics (Romania), TEMPO-Online, IAPC102 — Harmonised consumer price indices by group of goods and services, ECOICOP version 2 classification, table, extracted 9 September 2026.
- Eurostat, HICP — methodology and ECOICOP classification, methodological note, for the ECOICOP division definitions used in the recount.