Cost of living, honestly

Retail Price Index inflation was 4.3% for the year ending June 2026, up from 3.9% in June 2025 and 4.0% in March 2026. That reverses the downward trend since the December 2022 peak of 8.5%.

Cumulatively, £100 in June 2021 buys roughly what £131 buys now.

Fuel and light was the largest single contributor to inflation in the year to June 2026, rising 19.0% and driven largely by kerosene prices. A great many homes here are heated by oil, and that is a line in the budget that people arriving from mains gas do not anticipate.

Housing costs added a further 0.9 percentage points, rising 4.9%.

This is the part that rarely gets written down. In the year to June 2026, retired households experienced inflation of 5.2%. Low income households, owner occupiers without mortgages and households containing disabled people all experienced 5.1%. Households with mortgages and high income households experienced 4.0%.

The people with the least room to absorb rising prices are absorbing the most of them. If you are arriving on a senior salary, your experience of this island will genuinely differ from your neighbour's.

Average Local Market rent was £2,170 per calendar month in the first quarter of 2026, up 44.9% in five years. For most arriving households this is the largest single cost and the one most likely to be underestimated.

There is no VAT or sales tax in Guernsey. That helps on some purchases and matters less than you would think on others, because almost everything arrives by sea or air, and freight is priced into the shelf.

Budget separately for travel. Flights and ferries to the UK are a recurring cost rather than an occasional one, particularly if family are elsewhere, and they rise sharply in school holidays.

Do not budget on the island's reputation. Budget on the current bulletins, which the States publishes quarterly and which are linked below. Then add a line for heating oil and a line for getting off the island, because those are the two most consistently forgotten.