# Not every price rise weighs the same

*A canvas of a thousand dots. Romanian edition: https://mariuscomper.uk/recontorizarea/ · English: https://mariuscomper.uk/recontorizarea/en/*

Out of every 1,000 lei a Romanian household spends, 335 go on food. In the year of record inflation (2022), food still drove 485 out of every 1,000 dots of the price rise — while communications, a large share of the basket, contributed very little to the price rise: from 54 dots to 3.

## The basket, recounted for 2022

| Category | Basket weight | Out of 1,000 (basket) | 2022 price change | Out of 1,000 (contribution) |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| Food and non-alcoholic beverages | 33.4% | 335 | 22.7% | 485 |
| Housing, water, electricity, gas | 15.7% | 157 | 24.0% | 241 |
| Alcoholic beverages, tobacco | 8.1% | 81 | 7.9% | 41 |
| Clothing and footwear | 7.8% | 78 | 8.8% | 44 |
| Transport | 7.0% | 70 | 9.9% | 44 |
| Furnishings and home maintenance | 6.2% | 62 | 8.1% | 32 |
| Health | 5.9% | 59 | 7.4% | 28 |
| Communications | 5.4% | 54 | 1.0% | 3 |
| Personal care and miscellaneous | 5.3% | 53 | 11.4% | 39 |
| Recreation, sport, culture | 2.6% | 26 | 12.2% | 20 |
| Hotels, cafes, restaurants | 1.4% | 14 | 13.6% | 12 |
| Insurance and financial services | 0.7% | 7 | 19.7% | 9 |
| Education | 0.4% | 4 | 7.8% | 2 |

The official 2022 inflation rate was 14.1%; the sum of the thirteen contributions in the canvas comes to 15.65 percentage points — close, not identical, because of how the aggregate index chains months together.

## Your household is not the average household

Personal 2022 inflation rate, on each household profile's basket: employee 15.3%, pensioner 16.2%, farmer 17.1%, unemployed 16.8%, urban 15.4%, rural 16.3%. Nobody stayed below the 14.1% national average — that year, the price rise affected exactly the categories everybody buys, only the proportion changed. Farmers had the highest rate (+3.0 points above average), employees had the rate closest to the average (+1.2 points).

## Year by year, 2021–2026

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 driving inflation.

## Method and limits

Weights come from the INS family budget survey (table BUF109I, TEMPO-Online), by COICOP category, social category and area of residence. Annual price changes come from the harmonised consumer price indices (table IAPC102), by ECOICOP version 2 group. Both were extracted on 9 September 2026. The current classification starts in 2020, so the canvas covers only 2021–2026. Household profiles come from the survey's 2024 edition, the latest published by social category, and are applied to each selected year's own price changes, not their own historical structure. 2026 is an unfinished year: the latest figure available is from June.

## Sources

1. INS, TEMPO-Online, BUF109I — Structure of total household consumption expenditure, http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-ins/matrix/BUF109I, extracted 9 September 2026.
2. INS, TEMPO-Online, IAPC102 — Harmonised consumer price indices by ECOICOP version 2, http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-ins/matrix/IAPC102, extracted 9 September 2026.
3. Eurostat, HICP — methodology and ECOICOP classification, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/methodology.