According to the Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), the monthly change in Lebanon’s consumer price index reached 1.31% in May 2025, compared to 0.67% in April. On an annual basis, Lebanon’s CPI rallied by 14.44% to 7,361.57 in May 2025, compared to 6,432.52 in May of the previous year, with the average annual inflation rate for the first five months of the year 2025 attaining 14.65%.
The decelerating inflation pace owes to the widespread dollarization of products & services coupled with the stability of the LBP/USD exchange rate since the month of July 2023. In details, the index portrays a 21.36% y-o-y increase in the prices of food & non-alcoholic beverages (20.0% weight in the index), a 28.15% hike in housing prices (owner occupied; 13.6% weight in the index), not to mention the frantic 21.61% rise in healthcare prices (7.7% weight in the index) and 30.74% rally in education prices (6.6% weight in the index).
It is worth noting that restaurants & hotels prices soared by 13.51% y-o-y in May 2025 (2.8% weight in the index) and were accompanied by some 6.12% increase in the prices of recreation, amusement and culture (2.4% weight in the index) and some 6.44% surge in the price of housing – water, electricity, gas & other fuels (11.8% weight in the index).
Transportation (13.1% weight in the index) and communication (4.5% weight in the index) prices on the other hand were the only two components of the CPI to witness annual drops (0.93% and 3.24% respectively) in May. The following section captures the fluctuation in the key constituents of Lebanon’s consumer basket:
On a geographical basis, all regions across Lebanon (barring Beirut, which witnessed a 0.17% monthly drop in the CPI) saw a monthly rise in their CPI values in May 2025, with the sharpest increase taking place in Mount Lebanon (2.33%), followed by the Bekaa (0.82%), North (0.60%), Nabatieh (0.12%), and South (0.04%) regions.
