Consumer price inflation basket of goods and services: 2025

• In 2025, 23 items have been added to the basket for the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH) and 15 items have been removed, resulting in a total of 752 items in the 2025 basket.

• The same changes have been made to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) baskets.

• Additions include virtual reality (VR) headsets, men's sliders, exercise mats, pre-cooked pulled pork, and fixed tariffs for domestic gas and electricity.

• Removals include oven-ready joints, newspaper adverts and in-store cafeteria meals.

The contents of the baskets for 2025 are summarised in Annexes A and B of the accompanying dataset, and the main changes from last year are discussed in this article and listed in Tables 2 and 3 of the same dataset.

The shopping basket

Consumer price inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise or fall. Imagine a large "shopping basket" containing those goods and services. As the prices of the various items change over time, so does the total cost of the basket. Movements in consumer price indices represent this change.

Within each calendar year, the basket contents are fixed so that changes in the indices from month to month reflect only changes in prices, and not variations in the quality and quantity of items purchased.

However, the contents of the basket and associated expenditure weights are updated annually. This is important in helping to avoid potential biases that might otherwise develop, for example, because of the development of entirely new goods and services. These procedures also help to ensure that the indices reflect longer-term trends in consumer spending.

Changes to the items and associated weights are introduced in the February index each year, but prices are collected for both old and new items in January. This means that the figures for each year can be "chain linked" to form a long-run price index spanning many years. In other words, price changes between December and January are based on the old basket, while price changes between January and subsequent months are based on the new basket.

There are slightly different baskets for the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH), Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI), but the vast majority of items are the same in all three.

Our Consumer price indices, a brief guide: 2017 introduces the concepts and procedures underpinning the indices. These are described in detail in our Consumer Prices Indices Technical Manual, 2019 and our CPIH Compendium.

Representative items

There are some individual goods and services where spending is so large that they merit inclusion in the baskets in their own right, such as petrol. More commonly, a sample of specific goods and services must be selected that gives a reliable measure of price movements for a range of similar items.

Several factors are considered when choosing representative items, including:

• ease of finding and pricing the product

• availability throughout the year

• amount spent on a particular item or group of items

• variability of prices within a class

• an analysis of the balance across the basket

The allocation of items to groups can be analysed using a combination of weight and variability to help decide whether more items are needed in a particular part of the basket. Table 1 includes summary information, though the analysis is conducted at a finer level of detail.

This analysis cannot tell us which items should be priced, so choosing a set of items to represent each area remains a matter of judgement.

Various sources of information are used to review and update the baskets, including our Living Costs and Food Survey, market research data, trade journals and press reports. Changes in retailing are also reported by the price collectors.

The basket contents and changes between years should be interpreted only as representative items used in estimating consumer price changes. Additions and removals should not be viewed as a simple indicator of increased or reduced popularity.

Timing of changes

Changes to the baskets of goods and services are being introduced with the February 2025 consumer price statistics published on 26 March 2025.

Additions to baskets

As in previous years, developments in technology influence the basket updates and for 2025, a virtual reality (VR) headset has been introduced. Expenditure on this item has increased over recent years and is reported to have reached around £350m in 2024. Adding the item ensures the basket represents an emerging technology. It also improves our coverage of data processing and peripheral equipment.

Several new items have been introduced to represent specific markets where consumer spending is substantial or growing, and existing items may not adequately represent price changes. For example, men's sliders or pool sandals have been added to reflect a growing area of the footwear market for men. This will improve our representation of that market and add to the range of footwear items more generally.

We are introducing two items in response to the growing prevalence of fixed gas and electricity tariffs, which offer consumers a constant standing charge and unit rate for a set period. The new items account for the experiences of both consumers signing up to fixed tariffs in the current month, and consumers who signed up in previous months, with rolling-average bills used to produce the item indices.

Initially, the items will reflect tariffs of around 1 year in duration, so 12-month rolling averages will be used. A similar process is used in the existing mobile phone charges item, more details of which are available in Section 9.5.6.3 of the Consumer Prices Indices Technical Manual. These new items add to the variable rate tariffs for gas and electricity, which are already included in the baskets.

Some new items have been introduced to diversify the range of products collected for already established groupings. For example, ready-to-use noodles, cushions, and exercise mats have been introduced to expand representation in the relevant areas. Ready-to-use noodles add to the dried products already included and provide a better balance for the range of products available. Cushions improve our coverage of lounge furnishings and add to bedding, towels and curtains, which are already in the household textiles section of the baskets. Exercise mats increase the range of sports products. They became more popular when people started to exercise at home during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and their use has continued in organised exercise classes.

Analysis of the broad balance of representative items across the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH) highlighted a need to improve coverage across some categories, including accommodation services. This class includes an overnight hotel accommodation item, which is priced the day before the nominal overnight stay. Prices for this item tend to exhibit sharp movements potentially because of short-term demand fluctuations.

A second overnight hotel accommodation item is being introduced, which will be priced further in advance. The aim is that more rooms will be available for pricing and that the short-term demand pressures will have less of an effect on price. Additionally, the weight of the existing item will be split across the two. The aim is to reduce the volatility in the accommodation services series and aid interpretation.

In other cases, new items are direct replacements for the same or similar products, for example, because of a change in the market. This year, pre-cooked pulled pork replaces an oven-ready gammon or pork joint, which has fallen in popularity because of the rise in convenience cooking. The new item reflects that trend. We have also updated our confectionery sample, replacing some branded products and a bag of (non-chocolate) sweets with a bag of soft sweets and a bag of hard sweets. The additions should better represent the whole market, including for example, toffees and jellied sweets. The new items will be priced in the existing smaller outlets, as well as in larger supermarkets, to better represent where consumer expenditure occurs.

Removals from baskets

It is important that growth in the overall size of the baskets is limited each year so that production costs and processing times are contained. Therefore, several items have been removed in 2025. In some cases, this reflects low or decreasing expenditure, such as on newspaper adverts, which in turn reflects the continuing shift towards online communication.

In other cases, items have been removed to make way for new additions within the same grouping. For example, an NHS dental charges item has been replaced by NHS dental charges for routine check-ups and NHS dental charges for other services. The item is being subdivided in anticipation of a move to an updated classification system for compiling and analysing CPIH and CPI.

Elsewhere, analysis suggested that there was scope to remove items from certain groupings without any substantial loss of precision in estimates of overall price change, for example, fresh diced or minced turkey and in-store cafeteria meals. The turkey item was one of the lowest-weighted items within the meat class and the lowest-weighted within poultry.

The in-store cafeteria meal was in the "over-represented" restaurants and cafes class. This item was originally introduced into the baskets to reflect casual impulse dining in, for example, department stores. The prevalence of these outlets has dropped over recent years, while there has been an increase in other casual dining outlets whose prices are already reflected in the existing restaurants and cafes class.

Consumption segments and items

The "all items" consumer price indices incorporate price information for a wide range of goods and services. From March 2025, the process for aggregating this detailed information has changed. This is a necessary step towards incorporating larger and more detailed datasets into the indices.

Goods and services are allocated into "consumption segments" for different categories of expenditure. In some cases, these consumption segments correspond precisely to specific "items" for which we track prices over time. However, in cases where more comprehensive source data are available, or expected to be available in the future, a consumption segment will typically include much more than just one item. For simplicity, we will continue to refer to "items" in the monthly bulletin and detailed briefing note. More detailed methods information is available in our Impact analysis on transformation of UK consumer price statistics: January 2025 article.

Other methodological changes

The mobile phone applications (apps) price index was previously based on the price of apps in specific chart positions, as opposed to the price of specific apps. From the February 2025 index, we will collect the prices of specific products.

The Northern Ireland component of our private rents and owner occupiers' housing costs series has previously been based on our standard data collection processes. From the February 2025 index, we will use the Price Index for Private Rents. This source is already used for the Great Britain components.