PSA to rebase inflation to 2025

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) is moving forward with plans to update the base year used to compute inflation, shifting it to 2025 to better capture present-day consumer spending pattern.

National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa, speaking at a press briefing Thursday, said the agency has already started rebasing the consumer price index (CPI), which is currently anchored to the 2018 base year.

PSA technical teams are reviewing possible changes to the item weights in the CPI basket using results from the 2025 Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES). This process follows the completion of the survey’s second round in January.

“The data is being processed. The procedure there is we look at the expenditure side of the households, if they have adjustments in terms of weights. And from there, we do again our commodity outlet surveys and of course the retail price,” Mapa said.

Mapa added that the agency is also considering updating the reference year for the national accounts. However, he emphasized that revising inflation measures is the immediate focus. The planned change would follow earlier updates, when the base year for inflation and gross domestic product measurement was set to 2018 in 2020 and 2022.