The year-over-year inflation rate from PBS's Sensitive Price Indicator — the fastest-updating inflation signal published in Pakistan, well ahead of monthly CPI.
Source: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, weekly. PBS embeds roughly the trailing 10 weeks in each release — there is no separate multi-year weekly archive file, so this chart shows the real, rolling recent history rather than an estimated longer series.
The Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) is a weekly price survey covering 51 essential consumer items — food staples, fuel, and household necessities — collected from 50 markets across 17 cities. The figure on this page is the year-over-year % change in that index for the 'Combined' group, which blends all income-quintile baskets into one national inflation rate.
SPI's biggest advantage over CPI is speed: it's published every Friday, while headline CPI inflation comes out only once a month. That makes SPI the earliest real-time signal of price pressure building up — particularly useful for tracking volatile items like vegetables, fuel, and utilities between CPI releases.
As of the week ended 5 Nov '26, weekly SPI inflation is running at +12.3% year-over-year, compared to monthly CPI inflation of 9.6%. The two measures track each other closely over time but can diverge week-to-week and month-to-month because SPI's basket is narrower (51 essential items vs. CPI's much broader consumption basket) and far more exposed to short-term swings in perishables and fuel.
Methodologically, SPI is a Laspeyres-type fixed-basket index, recalculated weekly from freshly collected retail prices — it does not extrapolate or estimate; every weekly reading is a fresh, independent survey result from PBS field staff. The underlying index level (rather than the inflation rate shown here) has its own dedicated page — see Related Pages below.
Because food and fuel dominate the SPI basket, it disproportionately reflects the cost pressure felt by lower-income households — the same households CPI's 'lowest quintile' sub-index is designed to track, but available a full month sooner.
Policymakers and markets watch SPI between CPI releases as an early-warning gauge — a sustained run of weekly increases often foreshadows the next monthly CPI print, before that data becomes available.