Food Prices Rose 6.7% in Romania and Not at All in Cyprus
Silver Data Lab Research Desk · Statistical analysis · Published on 09 February 2026
- Data source
- Eurostat
- Reference period
- 2025
- Last updated
- 09 February 2026
Key estimates
- Food prices in the EU rose 2.8% on average in 2025.
- Romania records 6.7%, Estonia 6.2% and Bulgaria 5.7%.
- Cyprus records 0.0% and France 0.7%.
- The spread between the fastest and slowest is 6.7 percentage points on a single category of spending.
- The Member States with the fastest food inflation are those where food takes the largest share of household budgets.
The price change households feel first
Food is bought weekly, priced visibly and impossible to defer. That makes food inflation the component of the consumer price index most closely tied to how expensive people believe life has become, regardless of what the headline rate says.
Across the EU food prices rose 2.8% in 2025.
Where it was fastest
Romania records 6.7%, Estonia 6.2%, Bulgaria 5.7% and Slovakia 5.5%.
The pattern compounds. Food takes a larger share of household spending in lower-income Member States, and these are the Member States where food prices rose fastest. The same percentage increase costs a Romanian household more of its budget than a Dutch one before the difference in rates is taken into account.
That is the mechanism by which a common inflation figure understates the experience of poorer households, and it operates between countries as well as within them.
Where prices held
Cyprus records 0.0% — food prices in 2025 were unchanged on the previous year. France records 0.7% and Finland 1.4%.
The French figure follows a period of formal negotiation between retailers and suppliers, and France has repeatedly recorded lower food inflation than its neighbours during the recent inflationary period.
Why the spread matters more than the average
A range of 6.7 percentage points across a single spending category, inside a single market and for twenty Member States a single currency, is wide.
Food is among the most tradable of consumer goods, and the classical expectation is that prices for tradable goods converge inside an integrated market. They have not. Retail structure, distribution costs, national competition conditions and the share of food that is locally produced all intervene between the wholesale price of a commodity and the price on a shelf.
The relationship to the headline rate
The overall inflation study on this site reports a wider dispersion across the Union than a single monetary policy would suggest is comfortable. Food is one of the components producing it, and the countries at the top of this ranking are largely those at the top of the overall one.
That coincidence is not automatic. Energy inflation, covered separately here, ranks the Member States very differently and was negative across the Union in 2025, which is why the headline rate can be moderate in a country where food is not.
Food price inflation, 2025
| Country | annual average % change | Gap to EU averagepercentage points, derived |
|---|---|---|
| Romania | 6.7 | +3.9 |
| Estonia | 6.2 | +3.4 |
| Bulgaria | 5.7 | +2.9 |
| European Unionaggregate | 2.8 | — |
| Finland | 1.4 | −1.4 |
| France | 0.7 | −2.1 |
| Cyprus | 0.0 | −2.8 |
What these figures cannot tell you
- An annual average, not a point in time
- The figure compares the average price level in 2025 with the average in 2024. A country where prices rose early in the year and then stabilised records the same annual average as one where they rose steadily.
- A rate, not a level
- This measures how fast food prices changed, not what food costs. A Member State with low inflation may have expensive food and a Member State with high inflation may have cheap food.
- The basket is nationally weighted
- Each country's index reflects what its own households buy. Because national diets and shopping patterns differ, the same commodity price movement affects the national indices differently.
- Food and non-alcoholic beverages
- The category used here covers food and non-alcoholic beverages together, following the standard COICOP classification. Alcohol and tobacco are indexed separately.
Frequently asked questions
- How much did food prices rise in the EU?
- 2.8% on average in 2025, measured as the annual average change in the harmonised index. National rates ranged from 6.7% in Romania to 0.0% in Cyprus.
- Which EU country had the highest food inflation?
- Romania, at 6.7% in 2025, followed by Estonia at 6.2% and Bulgaria at 5.7%. These are also Member States where food takes a larger share of household spending, so the same rate costs households more of their budget.
- Where did food prices rise least?
- Cyprus, where food prices were unchanged from 2024, and France at 0.7%. France has recorded lower food inflation than most of its neighbours through the recent inflationary period.
- Does high food inflation mean expensive food?
- No. This measures the rate of change, not the price level. A country can have low food inflation and expensive food, or the reverse.
Methodological note
The harmonised index of consumer prices is compiled to a common European standard, which makes national rates comparable. This study uses the food and non-alcoholic beverages category as the annual average rate of change for 2025.
Values cover all 27 Member States and the EU aggregate as published.
The observation that food inflation was fastest in the Member States where food takes the largest share of household spending is derived by Silver Data Lab; the budget-share comparison is qualitative and not computed from a Eurostat expenditure series. The comparisons with overall and energy inflation draw on companion studies on this site.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser. The filters below are the ones applied.
HICP - annual data (average index and rate of change)
prc_hicp_aind
- Filters applied:
- freq=A · unit=RCH_A_AVG · coicop=CP011 · time=2025
- Extracted:
- 2026-08-11
- Source last updated:
- 2026-02-06
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