Serbian retail growth slows to 4.3% in June
Retail trade turnover was up 4.3 percent in real terms year on year in June, against 6.2 percent in May. Food, drink and tobacco carried the increase, while non-food goods trailed behind.
Retail trade turnover in Serbia was 4.3% higher in real terms in June 2026 than in June 2025, the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS) reported. Measured in current prices, before price increases are stripped out, the rise comes to 6.6%.
Shops are still selling more, only at a slower pace than a month earlier. For May 2026 the office recorded growth of 9.6% in current prices and 6.2% in constant prices. In thirty days the real rate lost 1.9 percentage points.
What Serbians actually bought
Broken down by product group, real growth against June of last year looks like this:
- food, drink and tobacco: 6%
- motor fuels: 3.9%
- non-food goods excluding fuel: 2.4%
The ranking matters. When staples grow faster than everything else, the basket is filling up with things households have to buy rather than things they choose to buy once there is money left over. Non-food goods, the most sensitive read on household confidence, grew at half the pace of food.
How strong is the half-year picture?
Over the first six months of 2026, turnover was up 8.7% in current prices and 7% in constant prices compared with the same period of 2025. June’s 4.3% sits 2.7 percentage points below that half-year average.
That gap points to something the statistical release does not spell out: if the six-month average is 7% and June closed at 4.3%, the early part of the half-year was distinctly stronger than the later part. Growth did not stop, but it visibly wore down heading into summer.
What the gap between the two rates says
Setting current prices against constant prices gives a rough measure of how much the retail basket itself has become more expensive. In June the ratio of 6.6% to 4.3% works out at roughly 2.2%. In May the ratio of 9.6% to 6.2% gave about 3.2%.
The gap narrowed by a full percentage point in a single month. For a shopper that means shelf prices are still climbing, only more slowly than in spring. For retailers it means a thinner margin on the same volume of goods sold, because dinar revenue is filling up more slowly than the number of items leaving the store.
When the next figure lands
RZS publishes retail trade turnover on the last working day of each month, covering the month before. The July reading, the first to capture a full summer of trading and the holiday season, is due at the end of August.
One fact holds regardless of how the numbers are read: household spending is still doing the heavy lifting for Serbian growth, with less force behind it than in the first quarter.
