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Read original →January Price Surge: What Got Indexed on January 1, 2026, and How Much It Will Add to Inflation
What's going up from January 1, 2026: VAT to 22%, utility tariffs by 1.7%, recycling fees by 10-25%. Economists and the Central Bank estimate the contribution to inflation at 1.2 to 2.5 percentage points. A breakdown of the impact on consumer prices.
What exactly is being indexed "from January 1"
Taxes in the price: VAT
From January 1, 2026, the VAT rate will increase to 22% (from the current 20%), while the preferential 10% rate will be preserved for socially important categories: essential food products, medicines, children's goods, educational publications, and several other items. Importantly, VAT is the tax that "seeps through" into prices fastest where businesses have short pricing cycle updates and minimal inventory. This primarily affects:
- retail and services, where prices change quickly;
- non-food goods, especially imported items and those with short-term contracts;
- B2B segments, where increased costs then migrate into the final price through the supply chain.
At the same time, in some markets the effect may be "spread out" due to warehouse inventory, fixed contracts, or competition that forces businesses to temporarily "absorb" part of the increase at the expense of margins.
Administrative tariffs: utilities
The tariff decision has already been formalized: the government has approved the utility rate adjustment indices for 2026. From January 1, 2026, the maximum index across all regions will average 1.7%. This doesn't mean an automatic 1.7% increase for every line item on your bill. We're talking about a "ceiling" for aggregate payments on average across the region—tariffs may rise more steeply in some places, less so in others, with parameters depending on regional authorities' decisions and the structure of utility payments. The next increase will be on October 1 for each region.
Auto and transportation basket: recycling fee
From January 1, 2026, another increase in the coefficients for calculating the recycling fee across different vehicle categories is expected. According to RBC Autonews estimates, the indexation could reach 10–25%, and the market is effectively beginning to price in these changes in advance. The mechanics here are straightforward: the recycling fee quickly shows up in dealer pricing because:
