Papua New Guinea inflation rate (CPI)
Headline consumer price inflation, year-on-year percent, latest published QUARTER. PNG's CPI is compiled quarterly (not monthly) by the National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Statistical Services Act. The NSO's own publication schedule has collapsed; the figures actually in circulation are released by the Bank of Papua New Guinea and the Department of Treasury, citing NSO as the source.
| Current value | 2.2 percent (YoY, quarterly) |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2026-01-01 |
| In force until | 2026-03-31 |
| Official source | Bank of Papua New Guinea — Monetary Policy Statement, MPC Meeting 2/2026, Port Moresby, 3 June 2026: 'Annual headline inflation fell to 2.2 percent in the March quarter of 2026 relative to the previous quarter, while core inflation measures remained relatively low, posing no urgency to raise the policy rate' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
READ THIS BEFORE USING THE SERIES. The National Statistical Office is the statutory producer of PNG's CPI, but its publication lag is extreme and its website is internally inconsistent. As at 23 July 2026, nso.gov.pg/statistics/economy/consumer-price-index/ has a NAVIGATION MENU that stops at 'June Quarter 2023', while the 'Related Documents' panel on the same pages carries files up to 'March-Quarter-2025' (release statement, final tables .xlsx, and a scanned report PDF). The newest CPI release NSO has actually published on its own site is therefore MARCH QUARTER 2025, signed by Acting National Statistician John Aseavu Igitoi and dated Friday 16 May 2025 — meaning NSO has published nothing new for roughly 14 months, and the newest reference quarter it has covered itself is 15 months old. The value served here (March quarter 2026, +2.2% YoY) comes from the BANK OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA's Monetary Policy Statement of 3 June 2026 — an official national authority publishing the national CPI outcome, in the same way the BCCR carries INEC's IPC in the Costa Rica file — NOT from an NSO release, and NOT from any IMF or World Bank estimate. If the consuming application requires figures traceable to the statistical office's own release, fall back to March quarter 2025 (+5.3% YoY), which is the last such release. Recent official quarterly YoY prints, all sourced to NSO but carried by BPNG or Treasury: Mar-2025 +5.3%, Jun-2025 +3.6%, Dec-2025 +4.1%, Mar-2026 +2.2%. September quarter 2025 was not located in any official publication. COMPOSITION TRAP: PNG's headline CPI is dominated by BETELNUT, a seasonal domestic item. BPNG's Governor noted in the March 2026 outlook that the December-quarter 2025 headline of 4.1% reflected a 29% rise in betelnut prices, and that EXCLUDING BETELNUT headline inflation was only 1.2%, in line with core measures of 0.7-1.8%. Headline swings of two-plus percentage points in PNG frequently say more about betelnut than about monetary conditions. Underlying (core) inflation was 3.0% in the June quarter of 2025. Downside pressure through 2025-2026 also comes from the GST zero-rating of 13 essential goods, which BPNG expects to unwind at the end of 2026. BPNG's own 2026 forecast is around 4.0% average headline, converging to about 3.0% over the medium term; Treasury's 2026 Budget projected 4.2% for 2026. ACCESS PROBLEMS: (1) NSO release statements are SCANNED, IMAGE-ONLY PDFs — no extractable text layer; they must be OCR'd or read visually. (2) The NSO left-hand CPI navigation is stale by two years relative to its own document list, so a source-watcher pointed at the menu will never see the newest release. (3) bankpng.gov.pg returns HTTP 403 to bare HTTP clients and needs a real browser. March Quarter 2025 release statement: https://www.nso.gov.pg/download/82/consumer-price-index/4242/march-quarter-2025-release-statement.pdf
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-04-01 | 1.4 | National Statistical Office — June Quarter 2023 CPI: 'The he |
| 2025-01-01 | 5.3 | National Statistical Office of Papua New Guinea — Release St |
| 2025-04-01 | 3.6 | Bank of Papua New Guinea — Monetary Policy Announcement, 2 S |
| 2025-10-01 | 4.1 | Bank of Papua New Guinea — 'March 2026 Outlook on the Econom |
Get it programmatically
curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/cpi
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/cpi/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/pg/cpiOther Papua New Guinea series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · corporate tax rate · income tax rates