Estimate how price changes affect your household expenses.
September 2026 · Provisional Released 12 Oct 2026 · Base 2024=100 Checking latest official data…
1. Set up your budget
For screen sharing or screenshots. Hiding changes only what is shown; calculations keep using your entries.
Amount credited after payroll deductions. Do not subtract those deductions again.
All India Combined — the basis for India’s national headline CPI inflation. Suitable for most users.
Advanced options
Keep Combined unless you specifically want nationwide Urban or Rural rates. These are not rates for your particular city or village. Your own annual price-change entries still take priority.
Switch modes without losing your expenses.
Use monthly consumption expenses. Current spending or expected price changes gives a scenario.
Help: which month’s expenses should I use?
Enter a typical monthly budget. For historical inflation, use expenses from the same month a year before the displayed data month. A current budget or expected increases creates a scenario.
For a historical comparison, compare the same goods and services over the same year. Buying more is not the same as paying higher prices.
2. EMIs, savings and other commitments · Optional · Expand
Reduces your available balance; excluded from inflation calculations.
These payments reduce your available salary but are excluded from inflation weights and price-change calculations. Enter monthly amounts in ₹ here, even when the expense table uses percentages.
Home, vehicle, education or personal loan instalments, including principal and interest. For credit-card repayments, count purchases in the expense basket only once; put only repayment of earlier debt here.
SIPs, mutual funds, stocks, deposits, PPF or voluntary pension contributions paid from take-home salary.
Direct tax payments from take-home salary that are not already deducted. Do not enter GST separately from purchase prices.
Cash gifts, donations or money transferred to others, where you are not also counting the resulting purchases as your expenses.
Keep in the inflation basket: rent, groceries, utilities, school fees and other consumption expenses, even if their price increase is 0%. Insurance premiums can go under Custom expenses with your own annual premium-change rate; they have no official rate in the current basket.
Avoid counting twice: use take-home salary and enter only additional payments made from it. Use annual payment ÷ 12 for a monthly average.
Other commitments: ₹0 /month Total monthly outgoings: ₹0 Salary left = take-home salary − inflation-basket expenses − other commitments
3. Enter expenses and your price changes
Your result updates as you type. View it in the bar below.
Enter monthly expenses. Leave annual price changes blank for official rates, or enter your own %. Expected increases create a scenario.
Help: monthly expenses, price changes and housing
Enter your annual price change for each category—actual or expected. An expected increase makes this a scenario, not measured inflation. Leave a rate blank to use the official rate; enter 0 for no change or a negative number for a price fall. Compare the same basket over the same year. These are annual percentages, not rupee increases.
Housing: a 5% rent increase is not necessarily a 5% increase for the entire housing-and-utilities category. If rent is ₹15,000 and utilities are ₹5,000 with no increase, enter 3.75% for that combined category: (15,000 × 5% + 5,000 × 0%) ÷ 20,000.
All fields start empty. Use monthly averages: annual tuition of ₹60,000 becomes ₹5,000 per month. Include consumption expenses; exclude savings, investments and loan principal.
How much did prices rise for you over one year? Enter your percentage if you know it—for example, enter 5 if the same goods or services cost you 5% more. Leave blank to use the government rate. Enter 0 for no change.
Detailed comparison: weights and inflation contributions
When expanded, each expense card shows your spending weight, government weight, rate used and contribution to inflation. Your inputs and result stay the same.
Official CPI division
Monthly expense (₹)
% of salary
Your expense weight
Govt base weight
Government’s annual price change (%)
Your price change (%) — optional
Rate used
Inflation contribution (pp)
Your expense weight = category expense ÷ total consumption expenses.
4. Add your own expenses
Need an expense with its own price-change rate? Add it here—for example, rent that rose 5% while your other housing costs stayed unchanged. Otherwise, you can leave this section empty.
Count each expense once. If you add an item here that you already included above, subtract its amount from that category. Your total expenses should stay the same.
No custom expenses yet. Add as many items or categories as you need.
Enter expenses to calculate. Official category rates are used unless you enter your own.
India’s official headline (Combined): 5.54%
One calculation: your spending weights × the rate used for each category. Custom increases replace official rates directly.
Monthly inflation-basket expenses
₹0
Salary not entered
Salary left after all outgoings
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Unallocated; not automatically savings
Share or save your result
Sharing the calculator sends only its link. The result image includes your inflation estimate and official comparison; salary, commitments, expense amounts and custom names are excluded.
What does this mean in rupees?
Illustration, not a forecast. This applies the displayed annual price-change rates once to your entered monthly expenses, keeping the same quantities and services. Government rates describe the past year; they do not predict next year’s prices. If you enter expected rates, this becomes your own scenario.
Illustrated monthly cost change at these annual rates
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Enter expenses to see the illustration.
Enter at least one expense to see the same-basket cost comparison.
This is the difference between two monthly basket costs after one annual change. It is not an additional increase every month.
How your estimate works
Salary is the reference for percentage entry and your budget balance. Inflation weights come from total consumption expenses, so a larger salary alone does not change inflation. Other commitments reduce salary left but never enter the inflation denominator. They stay as ₹ amounts when you switch expense-entry modes.
Category amount = salary × entered percentage ÷ 100 Personal weight = category amount ÷ total expenses Personal inflation = Σ(personal weight × category inflation) Your-rate estimate substitutes entered annual rates; blank fields retain official rates.
Example: with a ₹50,000 salary, food at 20% means ₹10,000. If total expenses are ₹40,000, food's inflation weight is 25%. If food inflation were 6%, its contribution would be 1.5 percentage points. This is an illustrative rate.
The same-basket comparison applies annual rates once. Your rate overrides are user-provided and are not government estimates. Avoid treating a spending increase caused by buying more as a price increase. Using expected rates creates a scenario; actual rates estimate past same-basket inflation. Neither captures buying more or changing the basket. Division averages retain the government's mix within each division; a later version using the 43 groups or individual items can better match your purchases.
How the government calculates CPI
Choose the basket and weights. The 2024 series draws expenditure weights from HCES 2023–24 and uses 12 divisions.
Collect comparable retail prices. NSO uses rural and urban markets, online prices and administrative sources.
Build price indices. Elementary indices use the Jevons method (geometric averaging); higher levels use the Young/Modified Laspeyres method with expenditure weights.
Calculate annual inflation. Compare the aggregate index with the same month a year earlier.
Government base weights are shown for comparison. Simply multiplying those base weights by division inflation rates does not exactly reproduce headline inflation: the effective annual contribution also depends on division index levels a year earlier.