KEY FACTS

Quarterly change

The June 2025 Consumer Price Index increased by 0.4% compared to the March quarter 2025.

• Education group increased by 4.6% mainly higher tertiary tuition fees
• Miscellaneous group: increased by 3.7%, driven by 25% rise in costume jewellery and 5.1% rise in personal hygiene items.
• Clothing and Footwear group rose by 1.9%, Clothing  up by 2.2%, Footwear down by 0.9%
• Recreation and Culture increased by 1.4%
• Housing and Utilities increased by 0.6%
• Transport rose by 0.5%
• Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages increased by 0.4%
• Furnishings and Household Maintenance rose by 0.2%

All these increases were counterbalanced by decreases in the

• Communications group decrease by 1.3%, mainly due to lower prices for telecommunication equipment’s.
• Restaurants and Hotels group fell by 0.9%

Annual change

From the June 2024 quarter to the June 2025 quarter, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) 1.3% with the Underlying CPI of 1.6%.

Overall increase seen in key consumer groups:

• Miscellaneous goods and services increased by 8.3%, the highest annual increase among all categories
• Clothing and footwear rose significantly by 7.2%
• Education and Health also recorded notable increases of 6.6% and 6.2%, respectively.

Categories with price declines

• Furnishings, household equipment and routine maintenance fell by -2.9%.
• Communication decreased by -1.6%.
• Recreation and culture dropped by -1.1%.
• Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels slightly declined by -0.2%.

Other group changes

• Food and non- alcoholic beverages rose by 2.1%
• Restaurants and hotels saw a moderate increase of 1.4%
• Alcoholic beverages & tobacco group and Transport group also experienced slight rise of 0.6%

More on Consumers Price Index…

Information about CPI

The Consumer Price Index covers price changes of the basket of goods and services consumed by all households on Rarotonga (the main island).

The base year is 2019. Prices are collected for 199 items and from selected outlets around Rarotonga. Individual prices are combined using weights from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) conducted in 2015/2016. The HIES information was used to select the basket of goods and services.

The inclusion of an underlying measure is a recent improvement and it is published at the same time as the CPI. The underlying measure excludes items of a highly volatile nature, items that are subject to policy changes.

It excludes some items fruits, vegetables, meat and fish, electricity rates, purchases of new and used motor vehicles, petrol and diesel, international airfares and domestic airfares.

The CPI is calculated as chain-linked Jevons indices (change in the geometric average price). At the higher level, indices will be calculated with standard Laspeyres-type aggregation.