Lesotho inflation rate (CPI)

What this value means

Reference month May 2026. All-items index 121.74 (2022 = 100), up from 120.37 in April 2026 and 117.59 in May 2025; month-on-month +1.1%. This is the third consecutive acceleration off the 2.2% cycle low in March 2026 and it is almost entirely an energy shock: transport rose 17.5% y/y and contributed 1.8 percentage points, driven by fuels and lubricants for personal transport at +42.6% y/y (index 106.41 to 151.70) and a 5.6% jump in road passenger transport fares. Food and non-alcoholic beverages, at 32.61% the largest basket division, rose only 1.7% y/y and contributed 0.6pp; bread and cereals actually fell 6.3% y/y. Clothing and footwear +5.6% (0.5pp); housing/water/electricity/gas +1.0% (0.1pp). ERROR IN THE OFFICIAL RELEASE — READ CAREFULLY: the Executive Summary of Report No. 14:2026 states the headline rate correctly as 3.5% in its first line and then says 'The main contributors to the 3.2% annual inflation rate were...' and repeats 'the total annual inflation rate of 3.2%' in the same paragraph. The 3.2% is a stale figure the Bureau failed to update; Table 1 and the front-page indicator both give 3.5%, and the divisional contributions listed do not sum to either figure exactly. Serve 3.5%. BASKET: rebased to 2022 = 100 with weights from the 2017/18 Household Budget Survey — food and non-alcoholic beverages 32.61, housing/water/electricity/gas 14.90, transport 11.13, clothing and footwear 8.12, restaurants and hotels 6.55, alcohol and tobacco 6.41. The report prints the old December 2016 = 100 and March 2010 = 100 weight columns alongside, so do not read weights off the wrong column. NO INFLATION TARGET: Lesotho has none — the Central Bank of Lesotho's objective is to keep domestic inflation broadly aligned with South Africa's in order to sustain the one-to-one loti-rand peg, so never describe a Lesotho print as 'within target'. The CBL's own MPC statements quote the Bureau's figures and are a useful cross-check. PUBLICATION LAG AND A GAP: the Bureau is running roughly two months behind — the May 2026 report is the latest as at 24 July 2026 and there is no June 2026 release. Worse, the APRIL 2026 report is MISSING from the Bureau's server entirely: CPI_April_2026.pdf and every casing/spacing variant tried return HTTP 404, while March, February, January 2026 and December 2025 all return 200. April's y-o-y rate is therefore carried in history from the Central Bank of Lesotho's 119th MPC statement, which quotes it as 3.1%. ACCESS: www.bos.gov.ls is a hand-built static site; the only CPI link on the homepage is the current month, and the Publications page (https://www.bos.gov.ls/Publications.htm) is client-rendered from a JavaScript template and exposes no archive links to a fetcher. The reliable route is to construct the URL directly as https://www.bos.gov.ls/New%20Folder/Copy%20of%20Economics/CPI_<Month>_<Year>.pdf with the month spelled out in full. PDFs are text-extractable.

Earlier values

Get it programmatically

curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/cpi
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/cpi/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/ls/cpi

Other Lesotho series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · corporate tax rate · income tax rates