The prices that Spanish households face today are significantly higher than eight years ago. Between July 2018 and June 2026, the national Consumer Price Index increased by 27%, according to the official calculator of the National Institute of Statistics.
The figure appears this Sunday in a report from La Razón linking it to the period of Pedro Sánchez in La Moncloa. The statistical data is correct. The political attribution requires a different reading: the CPI measures how prices change, but does not identify who or what causes each increase.
What a 27% increase really means
A simple way to visualize it is to take a representative basket of goods and services that cost 100 euros in July 2018. To acquire that same basket in June 2026, approximately 127 euros would need to be allocated.
This does not mean that absolutely all products have increased by 27%. The CPI is a weighted average of hundreds of goods and services consumed by households.
It also does not mean that all households have lost exactly 27% of their purchasing power. To calculate it, one would need to compare the evolution of prices with that of wages, pensions, or income of each household.
The big jump occurs after the pandemic
The temporal evolution helps to better understand the data. The general index had barely moved between July 2018 and the first months of 2020. Most of the accumulated increase comes after.
During that period, the exit from the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, the energy crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine, and subsequent international inflationary episodes occurred. In 2026, the rising cost of energy again pressures prices and has even led the ECB to resume interest rate hikes.
This does not eliminate the effect of national policies, fiscal, labor, or housing on the households' wallets. It does prevent explaining statistically the entire 27% through a single political cause.
The CPI is not exactly "the cost of living"
The INE itself makes this clarification.
The CPI measures the variation in the price of a fixed and representative basket of goods and services. A true cost of living index should measure how much the necessary spending changes to maintain the same standard of living and would allow households to substitute some products for others.
For that reason, the 27% is a good measure of the inflation accumulated since 2018, but it is more accurate to talk about the rise in prices than about an exactly equivalent increase in the cost of maintaining the same standard of living.
The economic issue for households is thus better defined: how much prices have risen and how much their disposable income has increased during the same period.