How Inflation Hit Europe, Country by Country

This is one chart, not thirty-one: annual HICP (Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices) inflation for every EU country plus the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, pulled directly from Eurostat's own data service rather than copied from a secondary source. Every line starts faint by default — nothing is pre-selected or hidden on load. Click any country's name below the chart to isolate it, click a few to build a comparison, or hover the chart itself for the exact value at any point.

What HICP actually measures

HICP is not simply Eurostat's label for CPI. It is a distinct, harmonised measure: every contributing country builds its index on the same product classification and the same methodological rulebook — what counts as a genuinely "new" model of a good, when a quality change gets priced out rather than counted as inflation — even though each country still weights its own basket to its own households' actual spending. A country's domestic CPI, the figure quoted in its own budget speeches, can and does diverge from its HICP reading; the most-cited gap is owner-occupied housing costs, which several national indices price in and HICP historically has not. The trade-off is comparability: a percentage for Sweden and a percentage for Romania can share one axis in good faith only because both were built to the same specification.

The 2022 shock, and the outliers it created

Nine country-years ran hotter than 12% during the 2022–23 energy crisis — Estonia peaked at 19.4%, Lithuania at 18.9%, Latvia at 17.2%, with Hungary, Czechia, Poland and Bulgaria also well into double digits. Plotting those on a true linear axis would compress a decade of ordinary variation for every other country into a sliver at the bottom of the chart. Instead, the y-axis is capped at 12%: any value above it is drawn pinned to the ceiling with a small ▲ marker, and the real number is always shown on hover — nothing is hidden, only repositioned so the rest of the chart stays readable.

That list of outliers isn't random geography. Central and Eastern European economies went into the shock more dependent on imported natural gas and refined fuel than Western Europe, so a spike in wholesale energy prices reached household bills faster and further. Several of the hardest-hit countries here — Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Romania — also run their own currencies; as those weakened against the euro and dollar through 2022, the imported half of the energy bill got more expensive on top of the shock itself. Countries paying in euros absorbed the same global price spike without that second layer.

Why the chart ends at "Dec '25," not 2026

The monthly HICP breakdown this chart draws on still only reaches December 2025, year-on-year, for these 31 countries — that per-country dataset hadn't caught up to 2026 when this chart was built. Eurostat has since published a euro-area-wide flash estimate for July 2026 (roughly 2.9%), but that aggregate figure isn't broken out by country, so it can't be plotted here. Rather than leave a gap or mislabel December 2025 as something newer, every line's true final point is drawn as a dashed segment and marked "Dec '25" on the axis.

The 2% line every euro-area country here is aiming at

None of this chart's gridlines mark it, but there is a target hiding behind every one of the twenty euro-area lines: the European Central Bank sets policy against 2% inflation over the medium term, treated symmetrically, so a spell running below 2% is taken as seriously as one running above it. No single month is expected to land on 2% exactly. Read against that line, most of 2016–2020 was undershooting territory for this group, and the Baltic peaks already noted above landed at roughly eight to ten times the target in the worst year. Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and the UK aren't euro-area members and don't answer to that mandate at all; their own central banks run separate targets, but nothing here binds them to it.