While access to income, or a lack thereof, lies at the heart of characterising inequality and poverty in society, poor households’ welfare levels are greatly influenced by fluctuations in the real values of whatever incomes they do have access to. This line of enquiry, namely the impact that relative final price movements have on households across the income distribution, is a new one for postapartheid South Africa, with its local intellectual origins lying in Kahn2. This article’s two main objectives are, firstly, to derive inflation rates for urban households grouped according to expenditure deciles and, secondly, to identify some of the key product categories responsible for the largest shares of inflation of the poorest 40 per cent of urban households. At a more generic level, the article is implicitly a representation of how the macroeconomic environment is able to, and indeed does, impact on household welfare.