What the TPSO consumer price index measures
The consumer price index (CPI) is the official measure of inflation in Thailand, compiled by the Trade Policy and Strategy Office (TPSO) of the Ministry of Commerce. Every month TPSO’s provincial offices collect the prices of a fixed basket of goods and services — the items a household actually buys, from rice, pork and eggs to petrol, electricity, bus fares, school fees, haircuts and cigarettes — and weight them by the share of household spending each item takes. The basket is grouped into seven expenditure groups: food and non-alcoholic beverages, apparel and footwear, housing and furnishing, medical and personal care, transport and communication, recreation and education, tobacco and alcoholic beverages. The all-items index is the weighted sum; the base year is 2023, whose average is set to 100, so a Phuket reading of 103.7 in 2026년 7월 means the basket cost 3.7% more than the 2023 average.
TPSO publishes the index for the kingdom as a whole, for five regions and for each of the 76 provinces. The Phuket series on this page is the provincial general-set CPI (ดัชนีราคาผู้บริโภคระดับจังหวัด, province code 83), and it runs from 1998년 1월; the national and Southern-region series come from the same system and the same base year. An index number says nothing about the level of prices — a Phuket index above the national one does not mean Phuket is dearer than Bangkok, only that Phuket prices have risen more since 2023. What the three series do show, month by month, is how fast prices are moving and which parts of the basket are moving them. Every figure on this page is the published index value; the year-on-year, month-on-month and cumulative rates are computed from those values at build time and re-computed whenever the file is refreshed.
Phuket against Thailand and the South, 2011–2026
Since 2011 (annual average) the Phuket basket has risen +26.0% against +20.1% for the country, and the two lines in the chart above rarely part company for long: the same fuel prices, the same rice and pork, the same electricity tariff and the same national policy decisions drive both. The differences are in the weights and in a few local markets — housing, prepared food and transport in a tourism economy — and they show up in the annual table. Across the 15 full years since 2011, Phuket’s annual average inflation was above the national rate in 8 of them. The hottest year for Phuket was 2011 (+5.7% on the annual average, +3.8% nationally) and the coolest 2020 (−1.2%).
The highest year-on-year reading of the period is 2011년 11월 at +7.7%, and the lowest 2020년 5월 at −3.5%. The two big events since then are both in the chart. In 2020 the pandemic pushed the index down: the longest spell of falling prices in the series ran from 2020년 3월 to 2021년 2월, 12 months, with the trough in 2020년 5월 when fuel collapsed and the island’s restaurants and transport had no customers; the 2020 annual average was −1.2%. Then the 2022 energy shock: Phuket’s year-on-year rate rose to +5.6% in 2022년 8월, the national rate to +7.9% in 2022년 8월, and 2022 as a whole came in at +4.3% for Phuket and +6.1% for the country. Falling prices are not rare on the island: since 2011 Phuket has printed 45 months below zero in 10 spells, most recently 2026년 1월. 2025 closed at 0.0% (+0.1% in 2024); over the 7 published months of 2026 the Phuket rate has averaged +1.9%, and in 2026년 7월 it stood at +3.7% against +1.9% for Thailand and +2.3% for the Southern region — above the national rate in 10 of the last twelve months.
What rose most: the seven groups in 2026년 7월
The all-items figure hides very different movements underneath. In 2026년 7월 4 of the seven Phuket groups were up on a year earlier, 2 were down and one was unchanged. The fastest-rising group was food and non-alcoholic beverages at +8.0% (+2.0% for the same group nationally); the weakest was recreation and education at −0.1%. Food and non-alcoholic beverages — the largest group in any Thai household budget and the one a visitor meets three times a day — rose 8.0% year on year and stands +19.3% above its 2019 average; housing and furnishing, which carries rent, electricity, water and household goods, was at −0.1%, and transport and communication, where petrol and fares sit, at +2.6%. Core inflation — the index without raw food and energy, the part central banks watch — was +4.1%, while raw food and energy together ran at +2.4%.
Over the longer run the ranking is different. Since the 2019 average the group that has risen most in Phuket is food and non-alcoholic beverages, +19.3%, against +8.8% for the whole basket; the full table below carries every group’s index, its year-on-year rate, its change since 2019 and the national rate for the same group. The differences matter for a budget because a tourist’s basket is not a resident’s: a visitor spends a far larger share on prepared food, transport and recreation than the average Thai household whose weights define the index, so the food and transport rows are usually the better guide to what a holiday or a long stay has done than the all-items line.
What it means for a traveller’s or an expat’s budget
The simplest way to read the index is in baht that you remember. A basket that cost 100 THB in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, cost 109 THB in Phuket in 2026년 7월 (110 THB on the national index); a 1,000-baht day out has become a 1,088-baht one. Measured against 7월 2019 rather than the 2019 average the change is +8.5%. For a visitor paying in dollars, euros or pounds the baht price is only half the story — the exchange rate moves faster than the index, and a strong or weak baht can add or erase a year of inflation in a month — which is why the Phuket Travel Price Index on this site records hotel, villa, tour, transfer and daily-budget medians in USD on fixed dates, and why the exchange-rate series sits on its own page. The CPI answers a different question: what has happened to the baht prices of everyday goods and services on the island, independent of the currency you arrive with.
For someone staying a season or a year, the index is the number to put next to a rent negotiation or a school-fee letter. Landlords and schools on Phuket quote increases in round percentages; the provincial CPI is the published measure to hold them against, and the housing-and-furnishing row is the closest official proxy for the household side of living costs, even though the rent of a foreigner’s pool villa is not in the Thai basket. The food row is the one to watch for eating out, because prepared food — meals in and out of the home — is inside it. Month-on-month readings are noisy: in 2026년 7월 the Phuket index fell 0.4% on 2026년 6월, and single months move with fruit and vegetable seasons and the fuel price; the year-on-year rate is the figure to quote.
Coverage, revisions and updates
The file covers 1998년 1월 to 2026년 7월 for Phuket, 343 months, with the national and Southern-region all-items indices and the same groups for the same months, taken through the open API of the TPSO index database (the same figures that the ministry’s monthly inflation release prints). TPSO publishes the month’s index in the first week of the following month, so the latest month on this page is normally one to two months behind the calendar; the stats refresh runs on the 5th and re-reads the last fourteen months so that any revision by TPSO replaces the earlier reading. TPSO re-bases the index every few years and republishes the whole history on the new base, which is why the series here is continuous back to 1998 on the 2023 base rather than spliced from older bases. Two cross-checks run on every refresh: the year-on-year rates computed from the stored indices are compared with the rates TPSO publishes for the same months, and the annual averages computed from twelve months are compared with the ministry’s own annual figures; a file that fails either check is not published. On the 2026-09-05 build both passed.
The compiled series is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to phukettravels.com and the Trade Policy and Strategy Office, Ministry of Commerce (Thailand); the CSV below carries every month for the three series and every group. 출처: 태국 상무부 무역정책전략국, 소비자물가지수 2023 = 100; retrieved 2026년 9월. The tourism statistics that describe the demand side of the same economy are on the statistics hub, the airport series on its own page, and every external source with its URL is on the sources page.