According to the Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), Lebanon’s consumer price index increased by 0.48% month-on-month in May 2026 compared to a monthly increase of 3.04% in April. On an annual basis, Lebanon’s CPI rallied by 19.04% to 8,763.51 in May 2026, compared to 7,361.57 in May 2025, with the average annual inflation rate for the first five months of the year 2026 attaining 15.93%. The decelerating inflation pace since 2023 and until end of year 2025 owes to the widespread dollarization of products & services coupled with the stability of the LBP/USD exchange rate since the month of July 2023. On the other hand, multiple components of the consumer price index saw double digit annual increase in their respective prices mainly owing to the war that erupted in the beginning of March of the current year. In details, the index portrays a 17.86% y-o-y increase in the prices of food & non-alcoholic beverages (20.0% weight in the index), a 14.02% hike in housing prices (owner occupied; 13.6% weight in the index), a 37.82% rise in transportation prices (13.1% weight in the index) owing to the increase in oil prices, some 30.07% rise in the price of housing – water, electricity, gas & other fuels (11.8% weight in the index), not to mention some 2.70% rise in healthcare prices (7.7% weight in the index), and the 35.67% rally in education prices (6.6% weight in the index). It is worth noting that clothing & footwear prices (5.2% weight in the index) rose by 5.71% y-o-y in May 2026 and were accompanied by a 15.60% annual hike in restaurants & hotels prices (2.8% weight in the index), and some 48.40% increase in the prices of recreation, amusement and culture (2.4% weight in the index). Communication (4.5% weight in the index), on the other hand, was the only component of the CPI to have witnessed an annual drop (0.78%) in prices in May. The following section captures the fluctuation in the key constituents of Lebanon’s consumer basket:

On a geographical basis, all regions (barring the Nabatieh region which registered a 0.03% monthly drop in its CPI value) across Lebanon saw a monthly rise in their CPI values in May 2026, with the sharpest increase taking place in the South (0.82%), followed by the Mount Lebanon (0.58%), Bekaa (0.39%), North (0.37%), and Beirut (0.35%) regions.