Serbia inflation hits 4.4% in October, fuel up 18.7%
Serbia's statistics office says annual inflation rose from 4.1 to 4.4 percent in October, with prices up 0.8 percent on the month, four times September's pace.
Consumer prices in Serbia were 4.4 percent higher in October than in the same month last year, the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS) announced on November 12. Prices rose 0.8 percent from September and an average of 4.1 percent compared with December 2025.
Annual inflation accelerated from 4.1 percent in September. Monthly price growth jumped from 0.2 percent in September to 0.8 percent in October. By the harmonized index of consumer prices, which is comparable with Eurostat data, inflation in October stands at 4.6 percent.
What got the most expensive in October?
Clothing and footwear recorded the biggest monthly rise, 2.4 percent. Food and non-alcoholic beverages followed with 1.7 percent, education with 0.9 percent, personal care, social protection and other services with 0.8 percent, restaurants and hotels with 0.6 percent, and transport with 0.5 percent.
Alcoholic beverages and tobacco, information and communication, and recreation, sport and culture each rose 0.2 percent. Housing (water, electricity, gas and other fuels), health, and insurance and financial services each rose 0.1 percent. The only major group that got cheaper was furniture, household equipment and routine home maintenance, down 0.2 percent.
What costs more than a year ago?
On an annual basis the picture is uneven. Vegetables are 9.2 percent more expensive, while fruit is 11.4 percent cheaper. Beer is up 6.5 percent, tobacco 7.1 percent, and clothing and footwear 3.1 percent.
Housing as a whole is 5.2 percent more expensive, but the differences inside that group are large:
- housing rents are up 11 percent
- home maintenance and repairs are up 11.8 percent
- water supply is up an average of 17.5 percent
- garbage collection is up 10.4 percent
- sewage is up nine percent
Services in the transport group cost about 11 percent more, mostly because of fuel. Package holidays are almost 25 percent more expensive than in October last year.
Why do the fuel and food figures differ?
The sources disagree on the decimal. The daily Danas, citing RZS, reports that fuel is up 18.7 percent on the year and food up 1.1 percent. The National Bank of Serbia (NBS), whose figures were relayed by Telegraf and Tanjug, reports a 19.0 percent rise in oil product prices and a 1.2 percent rise in food and non-alcoholic beverages. The gap is less than one percentage point, and neither source explains where it comes from.
The central bank adds that in October, food prices were higher than a year earlier for the first time in more than a year. Core inflation is 4.9 percent, the same as in September. Energy is 8.3 percent more expensive on the year.
The central bank attributes the slowdown in energy price growth to last year’s electricity price increase dropping out of the annual comparison. The monthly energy rise of 0.3 percent came entirely from oil products.
The headline figure also does not mean every product rose by that much: 4.4 percent is the average price change across all goods and services covered by the statistical survey. How hard rising prices hit a particular household depends on what it spends most of its income on.
