ONS invites public to measure personal inflation

Users are invited to input their personal expenditures in order to obtain an estimate of how their experience of inflation is different from the official Retail Price Index (RPI).

One of the reasons the ONS created the calculator was because of public distrust of the official rate of inflation.

ONS inflation expert Jim O’Donoghue said: “An individual’s personal inflation rate is more than likely to differ from the average because we all spend different amounts of money on different goods and services whose prices may move in different ways.

“Indeed, it would be unusual to find somebody who precisely reflected the average, despite the strenuous efforts taken to ensure that the RPI is representative of average expenditure.”

The calculator works by “weighting together” price indices from the RPI to arrive at a personally-tailored inflation rate.