Income tenth 2
Prices faced by this group rose by 3.7% over the year to March 2026, 0.1 percentage points above the all-households rate.
Money Atlas · Map 01
The same inflation rate does not land on every household.
Explore how the cost pressures recorded for different UK households have moved since 2022. Change the lens, select a household group and travel through time.
Official ONS dataNo accountNo personal data
Choose a household lens
Ten equal groups, from the lowest-income tenth to the highest. ONS treats deciles 2 and 9 as the more stable low- and high-income comparison.
Jan 2022Mar 2026
Household inflation landscape
March 2026
3.7%Income tenth 2
Income tenth 23.7%
0.1 percentage points above the all-households rate.
The trail over time
See when the paths diverged.
The line for all UK households is a benchmark. Select a household above, then move the date to inspect a particular month.
What the map is showing
Three things to notice.
A 0.2 point gap
Among the more stable deciles 2 to 9, Income tenth 2 had the highest rate (3.7%) and Income tenth 9 the lowest (3.5%).
The peak for this group
Income tenth 2 reached 13.6% in October 2022. A current rate can hide how different the path was.
Plain-English guide
What the terms mean.
This is a view of average household groups, not a calculator of your personal inflation rate.
Annual inflation rate
The percentage change in the cost of a representative basket over the previous 12 months. A 3.6% rate means that basket costs 3.6% more than it did a year earlier.
Household Costs Indices (HCIs)
ONS measures designed to show how changing prices affect different household groups. They include some costs, such as owner-occupier housing and interest payments, differently from CPI.
Income decile
Households ranked by equivalised disposable income and split into ten equal-sized groups. Decile 1 is the lowest-income tenth; decile 10 is the highest. ONS notes that the outer two groups can have unusual composition, so deciles 2 and 9 are more stable for comparison.
Democratic weighting
Each household's expenditure pattern has an equal influence on the group average. CPI instead gives more weight to households that spend more in total.
Why household rates differ
Groups spend different shares on energy, food, rent, mortgages, transport and other costs. When those prices move at different speeds, the inflation experience diverges.
Percentage points
The arithmetic difference between two rates. If one rate is 4.0% and another is 3.5%, the gap is 0.5 percentage points—not 0.5%.
Read this map carefully
Useful for comparison, not a personal diagnosis.
- The groups are UK-wide averages. Your own spending pattern may be very different.
- The retirement and children categories are separate comparisons and cannot be combined here.
- The first and tenth income deciles are visible for completeness, but ONS cautions that their composition can be unusual and expenditures unrepresentative.
- ONS labels these figures official statistics in development; the January to March 2026 values are provisional and estimates may be revised.
- The chart shows price change, not whether a household can comfortably absorb that change.
SourceOffice for National Statistics
Household Costs Indices, UK: January to March 2026, released 28 May 2026. Table 1: all-items percentage change over 12 months by subgroup. Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0.