Nigeria’s inflation rate eased by 0.52% to 23.71% in April 2025, down from 24.23% recorded in March.
This is according to the report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday.
This is actually against majority of analysts’ expectation following the continuous rise in energy cost which has kept rising cost-of-living persistent. Those that predicted decline did so on the premise of favorable base effect.
According to the NBS report, on a year-on-year basis, the headline inflation rate dropped sharply to 9.99% from the 33.69% recorded in April 2024.
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On a month-on-month basis, inflation stood at 1.86% in April 2025, down from 3.90% in March, representing a 2.04 percentage point decline. This indicates that the rate at which prices increased in April slowed compared to the previous month.
Core Inflation
The country’s Core inflation stood at 23.39% in April 2025 on a year-on-year basis, a declined by 3.45% when compared to the 26.84% recorded in April 2024. Month-to-month, the Core Inflation rate declined by 2.39% to 1.34% in April 2025 compared to March 2025 (3.73%), the report revealed.
The average twelve-month annual inflation rate was 24.91% for the twelve months ending April 2025, which was 2.07% points higher than the 22.84% recorded in April 2024.
Urban vs Rural inflation
According to NBS report, urban inflation stood at 24.29% year-on-year, 11.71% lower than the 36.00% recorded in April 2024. Month-on-month, the urban inflation rate dropped to 1.18% in April 2025 from the 3.96% in March.
The twelve-month average for urban inflation was 30.41%, slightly higher than the 30.02% recorded in April 2024.
Rural inflation on the other hand, dropped to 22.83% year-on-year by 8.81% point from the 31.64% recorded in April 2024. On a month-on-month basis, rural inflation stood at 3.56%, down from 3.73% in March. The twelve-month average for rural inflation was 26.29%, slightly lower than the 26.38% recorded in the same month last year.
Food inflation
Food inflation in April 2025 was 21.26% year-on-year, a significant 19.27 percentage point drop from the 40.53% recorded April 2024.
The NBS attributed this sharp decline largely to a base-year effect resulting from a methodology change.
Month-on-month, food inflation declined slightly to 2.06% in April from 2.18% in March.
The NBS noted that the drop was driven by reduced prices in staple food items such as maize flour, wheat grain, dried okro, yam flour, soya beans, rice, bambara beans, and brown beans.
