Anyone who has lived in Curaçao a long time does not need a chart to know that things cost more than they used to. What the data adds is the scale. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) Curaçao, the island's consumer price index stood at 11.8 in January 1970. By May 2026, the most recent month CBS has published, it had reached 106.2. That is roughly a ninefold increase over fifty six years. The number is not a one time jump. It is the accumulated weight of more than five decades of price changes, some slow, some sharp.
A word on how that number is built, since it matters for reading it correctly. CBS rebased the whole series to 2023 as its reference year of 100, and it introduced a new calculation method starting in January 2024. Both changes sit on top of the same continuous history, so a level like 106.2 is only meaningful next to other levels on the same 2023 basis, not against an old publication that used a different base year. What has not changed is CBS's own published year over year inflation rate, and that is the figure worth following month to month.
The sharpest recent move in that inflation rate came in 2022. Year end inflation that year hit 7.4%, the highest year end rate CBS has recorded since 1982. It did not stay there. Inflation cooled every year afterward: 3.5% at the end of 2023, 2.6% at the end of 2024, and 2.0% at the end of 2025. For comparison, year end inflation had been a modest 2.6% in 2018, 2.6% in 2019, 2.2% in 2020, and 3.8% in 2021, before the 2022 spike and the steady decline that followed. Four straight years of cooling is arguably the more useful headline than the spike itself. It says something about how the shock worked its way through the economy, rather than settling in and staying there.
Where that pressure landed matters as much as how large it was. Looking at CBS's category breakdown, which runs from 2001 onward, food prices in Curaçao have climbed about 320% since then, more than four times over. Housing costs, across that same twenty four years, rose about 65%, a fraction of the pace. That gap is the story underneath the headline number. Cost of living increases are not spread evenly across a household budget or a business's cost base. A household or business that spends a larger share on food than on shelter has felt this quarter century of price change far more sharply than the overall index alone would suggest.
Put those two categories next to the rest of the basket and the pattern holds up. Since 2001, Curaçao's overall CPI is up about 82%. Food is up 320%. Transportation is up a comparatively modest 26%. Housing, at 65%, sits closer to transportation than to food. Three categories, three different stories, all folded into one average that, taken alone, would tell you almost nothing about which of them actually moved and by how much.
None of this requires a forecast or a model, just a clear look at numbers CBS already publishes every month. That is the part we find most useful about pulling a series like this together. The story was always sitting in the data, it just needed the right numbers lined up next to each other and read plainly. It is also close to the work we do for organizations across the region: helping them see their own numbers with that same clarity, so the decisions that follow are built on what is actually happening, not on impression or a single average. Curaçao's cost of living has moved a long way since 1970. Knowing exactly how, and where, is the useful part.