Brazil Real Inflation vs. official IPCA
Brazil has an official inflation measure: the IPCA, published monthly by IBGE (Brazil's national statistics agency). But Rico aos Poucos builds its own fixed basket of everyday essentials — food, rent, utilities, fuel, transport — to measure the inflation actually felt in the wallet, without the substitution adjustments IBGE applies. Both series are shown here side by side, month by month, so you can compare what the official index says vs. what a fixed standard of living actually costs. An independent index by Rico aos Poucos — open methodology, not an official index, not investment advice.
Region
Period
Cost of living
How much R$ (Brazilian reais) 100 became over the period (set by the filter above), tracking each index. Lines start at 100 at the beginning of the period.
Month by month: ours vs. the government's
How much each month rose in our basket and in the government's official IPCA (IBGE), with the 12-month accumulated figure alongside. The first row is the next month (not yet released): we show when it comes out, our inflation projection and, for the IPCA, the official preview (IPCA-15) once it is out — or the market expectation (Focus) before that — plus the expected 12m accumulated — all speculative until the release. Tap a row for details.
"Ours" = monthly change in our fixed basket. "Gov." = official IPCA from IBGE. The 12m accumulated shows ours/IPCA stacked. Below each month's IPCA, "exp." is the market expectation that existed for that month (Focus/BCB median) — lets you see if inflation came in above or below expectations. For the next month, "IPCA-15" is IBGE's official preview (out ~the 25th, before the final number).
Where inflation hurt the most
Change by basket over the selected period.
Item by item: what went up (and by how much)
Each item in the basket, with its price evolution over the selected period. Read it as: "R$ 100 at the start of the period → R$ X at the end". Tap a basket to expand.
Base: official price change for each IPCA sub-item (IBGE). This is not the absolute price of a specific product, but how much the item got more expensive — hence the "R$ 100 → R$ X" format.
Prices we collect directly from the source
Independent primary collection — actual price at the pump, per gas cylinder, on the electricity bill, and at the wholesale market. Updated automatically.
How the index is calculated (and why you can trust it)
Methodology
We use the Laspeyres fixed-basket formula — the same family as the IPCA and the ICV-DIEESE. Within each sub-index (e.g. the meat basket, with three cuts + chicken + processed), items are combined by geometric mean with equal weight, exactly as IBGE does. The baskets are summed with frozen weights, based on household expenditure structure (POF/IBGE), but which we never change — that is the anti-manipulation guarantee.
Basket weights (fixed)
Where the prices come from
Brazil's most granular and automatable price data is official — and the raw price (the price per liter at the pump, the regulated tariff) is much harder to "manipulate" than the aggregated index. So we do the honest thing: official price, our own methodology.
- Backbone: monthly change per IPCA sub-item (IBGE/SIDRA table 7060).
- Fuel and cooking gas: ANP (Brazil's petroleum agency) — retail prices collected by law across hundreds of municipalities.
- Electricity: ANEEL (Brazil's electricity regulator) — residential tariffs approved for each distributor.
- Wholesale food: CEPEA/ESALQ — physical commodity price reference for agriculture (beef, chicken, rice, coffee...).
Brazil and South region
The IPCA has no state-level breakdown. The regional breakdown available is by metropolitan area — we use Greater Porto Alegre (proxy for Rio Grande do Sul state) and Greater Curitiba to compose the "South" region. ANP does have state-level fuel prices — so in the fuel/gas panel you see the actual Rio Grande do Sul figure.
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