Poland records EU’s third highest inflation in August

Poland recorded the third-highest level of inflation in the European Union last month, new Eurostat data show. Whereas inflation has slowed across the bloc as a whole, in Poland it has remained high after the government partially unfroze energy prices in July.

Annual inflation in Poland stood at 4% in August, behind only Romania (5.3%) and Belgium (4.3%), according to Eurostat.

The EU agency uses a harmonised measure of inflation known as HICP. That makes figures comparable across countries but means that they differ from nationally published ones. For example, Poland’s official inflation rate in August was 4.3%

In August, Poland was among the EU’s top three countries for inflation for the first time since July 2023. Annual inflation slowed in twenty EU countries, remained stable in one and rose in six.

The lowest annual inflation rates were recorded by Lithuania (0.8%), Latvia (0.9%) and Finland, Ireland and Slovenia (all 1.1%). Across all EU countries as a whole, annual inflation stood at 2.4%, down from 2.8% in July.

Across the 20 eurozone countries, it stood at 2.2%, down from 2.6% the previous month. The slowdown in inflation in the euro area was primarily driven by a 3% year-on-year fall in energy prices.

Inflation in Poland accelerated in July with the partial unfreezing of energy prices. That month, Poland’s annual HICP inflation rose 1.1 percentage points from June, the fastest acceleration in the EU. This has widened the gap between the rate of price increases in Poland and the EU average.

According to forecasts, inflation will continue to accelerate in Poland in the coming months, reaching above 6% in early 2025.

Meanwhile, core inflation (which excludes the most volatile components, such as energy and food prices) stood at 3.7% year-on-year in August, down slightly from 3.8% in July, new data from the National Bank of Poland (NBP) show. Analysts expect core inflation to rise above 4% in the coming months.

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Main image credit: Karolina Kaboompics / Pexels 

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.