Belgium - Consumer Price Index (CPI)

For Belgium, the CPI series are monthly and cover various measures of price evolution. CPI is economic indicator measures the price evolution of a basket of goods and services that are bought by households and that represent their consumption habits. The index does not necessarily measure the price level, but rather the fluctuation between two periods in time: the base year and the current price.

At national and European, level the index represents an important indication of price increases or inflation. The consumer price index is divided into 12 main groups according to the European COICOP classification (classification of individual consumption by purpose). Each main group consists of a number of subgroups with according representative items.

Active:

• Classification: ECOICOP v2
• Measurement: Fixed-base index relative to 2025 (Index 2025=100)
• Adjustment: Not seasonally adjusted (NSA)
• Native frequency: Monthly
• Start date: Uniformly 2006m1

Predecessors:

• 2013=100 - {1920m1, 1977m1, 1994m1, 1998m1} to 2025m12 ("_13")
• 2004=100 - 2005m1 to 2014m1 ("_04")
• 1996=100 - 1988m1 to 2005m12 ("96")

Global concept alias(es):

• CPI

The consumer price index remains a fixed-base Laspeyres index, which means that the weights of all main groups and sub-groups are fixed during its 8-year course. The new representative items are introduced with a weighting from one or more products within a group. Changing representative items or weights in the product basket does not distort the index.

Since 2008, the composition of the index basket is checked every two years against possible changes in household consumption patterns. This helps to better take into account new products on the consumer market and also ensures a representative product basket during the entire index evolution between two base periods.

Moody's Analytics supplements

For the all-items index, we back-extend (1920m1 to 2005m12) and construct a seasonally adjusted counterpart.

Attribution

• Statistics Belgium

Further reading

At Eurostat:

• Statistics explained: Consumer prices - inflation

At IMF (SDDS Plus):

• Price index: consumer prices

• Dec 2007 - Initial version.
• Apr 2014 - Rebased to 2013.
• May 2015 - Addendum of special aggregates.
• Jan 2022 - Change of source, additional history.
• 4 Feb 2026, Phillip Thorne - Rebased to 2025: Properties, Moody's Analytics supplements, Further reading.