I nearly got inflation wrong this week

I almost wrote that UK inflation was 3.3%.

It wasn’t. It was 3.1%. Both numbers are real, both are in the same release from the Office for National Statistics, and they sit about a centimetre apart on the page. That is exactly why it nearly happened.

Two numbers, one release

The ONS publishes more than one measure of inflation each month. The two you see most are:

• CPI, the Consumer Prices Index. This is the measure behind the 2% target the government sets the Bank of England, so it is the one that matters for interest rates. In August 2026 it was 3.1%.
• CPIH, which is CPI plus two big costs CPI leaves out: the housing costs of people who own their own home, and Council Tax. The ONS calls it its most comprehensive measure of inflation. In August 2026 it was 3.3%.

Neither is wrong. They measure different things. But if your story is about interest rates, and you write 3.3%, you have used the wrong number, and every sentence after it that compares inflation with the 2% target is slightly off.

How I caught it

I had written the headline and the first paragraph, then went back to paste the source link under the story. When you copy a link, you look at the page again. The label next to 3.3% said CPIH.

That is now a rule on my checklist: read the number’s label twice. Not the number. The label. Numbers are easy to copy. Labels are easy to skip.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Being wrong by 0.2 percentage points does not sound like much. But the whole point of this site is that you can trust the numbers without checking them yourself. The first time you catch a mistake here, you stop trusting the rest. So the standard has to be: every number traced back to the page it came from, with the right label on it.

If I ever do get one wrong, it will be corrected on the issue itself and listed on the accuracy page. That is the deal.