Soaring interest payments push the inflation rate up for this group
Homeowners with a mortgage experienced the highest annual inflation rate in the year to September 2023, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reported.
The latest ONS Household Cost Index (HCI) shows that the average mortgage borrower had a 9.3% personal rate of inflation, way above the 6.7% consumer prices index for September.
ONS said this was mainly because of mortgage interest payments, pushing the inflation rate up for this subgroup relative to other tenure types.
Outright owner occupiers had a 7.4% HCI, while social and other renters had 8.8%.
The lowest annual inflation rate in September 2023 was for private renters at 7.2%, whose inflation rate was also the lowest at the October 2022 peak.
In October 2022, the highest rate of 13.5% was experienced by both social and other renters, and outright owner occupiers.
The Household Costs Indices show how changing prices and costs affect different subgroups of the population. They differ from the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), which show how the prices of goods and services consumed by all households in the UK change over time.
The HCIs, ONS explained, are intended to complement its lead measures of inflation CPIH and CPI by providing insight into the inflationary experience of different household subgroups.
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