Nigeria recorded a sharp slowdown in price growth in October, with the country’s headline inflation rate dropping to 16.05% year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on Monday. The figure marks a substantial decline from 18.02% in September 2025 and is less than half the 33.88% posted in October 2024.
The steep year-on-year reduction reflects both genuine easing of price pressures and the effect of rebasing the Consumer Price Index to a new base period (November 2009), which the NBS implemented earlier this year.
On a month-on-month basis, prices rose by 0.93% in October, slightly faster than the 0.72% increase recorded in September, indicating that the pace of price rises picked up marginally during the month.
Urban and Rural Divide Narrows
Urban areas saw inflation cool to 15.65% year-on-year, down from 36.38% in October last year. Rural inflation followed a similar trend, falling to 15.86% from 31.59% over the same period.
Month-on-month, urban prices climbed 1.14% while rural prices advanced at a slower 0.45%, highlighting continuing differences in cost-of-living pressures between city and countryside.
Food Prices Record First Annual Decline in Years
Food inflation, long the main driver of Nigeria’s price surge, plunged to 13.12% year-on-year in October – a remarkable 26 percentage point drop from the 39.16% registered twelve months earlier. The NBS attributed much of the annual decline to the statistical base effect from rebasing.
Notably, month-on-month food inflation turned negative for the first time in recent memory, falling 0.37%. However, the decline was smaller than the -1.57% drop seen in September, with higher prices for items such as onions, oranges, pineapples, shrimp, groundnuts, leafy vegetables, goat meat, and offal partially offsetting seasonal harvest gains.
Analysts Welcome Moderation
Economists had widely expected a slowdown. Independent forecasts published last month projected October headline inflation between 16.20% and 17.76%, with the actual outcome coming in near the lower end of that range.
“The combination of a more stable naira, better forex liquidity, harvest-season supply improvements, and relatively contained energy costs has finally started to feed through to consumer prices,” said Ayodele Adebayo, senior economist at Lagos-based Chapel Hill Denham. “While the rebasing flattens the year-on-year comparison, the underlying trend is clearly disinflationary.”
Core inflation measures (excluding volatile food and energy items) were not detailed in Monday’s release, but analysts anticipate further evidence that broader price pressures are easing.
The October report offers the Central Bank of Nigeria fresh evidence that its aggressive monetary tightening cycle over the past two years, which pushed the policy rate to 27.50%, is bearing fruit. Markets will now watch whether the Monetary Policy Committee opts to pause or deliver a smaller hike at its next meeting later this month.
For millions of Nigerian households, the lower inflation reading brings modest relief after years of double-digit price increases that eroded purchasing power. However, with headline inflation still above 16%, the cost-of-living squeeze remains far from over.
