Prices rose 4.1%. Energy rose 11.6%. Guess which one your price list followed

Two numbers came out of the same OECD release on 8 September. Consumer prices across the OECD are up 4.1% on the year. Energy is up 11.6%. If you set your prices once a year against the inflation figure on the news, you have been recovering roughly a third of what your electricity actually did, and the difference has been coming straight off your profit since April.

The gap, in four numbers

From the OECD's release of 8 September 2026, all year-on-year, all for July 2026:

• All items: 4.1%. Broadly stable, after 4.2% in June.
• Energy: 11.6%. Above 10% for the fourth consecutive month.
• Core, meaning everything except food and energy: 3.6%. It has sat between 3.6% and 3.8% every month this year.
• Food: 3.2%, down from 3.4% in June, and falling in 23 of the 38 member countries.

Read those together and the picture is not "inflation is back". Core is flat. Food is easing. One line is doing almost all of the work, and it is the line you cannot serve fewer customers to avoid.

The turn was fast. OECD energy inflation was negative 0.5% in February 2026. Then 8.1% in March, 13.1% in April, 15.7% in May, 11.7% in June, 11.6% in July. A cost that was gently falling at the start of the year is now rising at close to three times the rate of everything else.

It has not stopped. Eurostat's flash estimate of 1 September put euro area energy inflation at 14.3% in August, up from 10.3% in July, which pushed euro area headline inflation to 3.3%. Over the same month, food, alcohol and tobacco there was flat at 1.2%.

Find your own market in the same table

The OECD publishes each country separately, so you do not have to use the average. July 2026, year-on-year energy inflation:

• New Zealand: 23.1%. Highest of the lot. Note that New Zealand reports quarterly, so this is Q2 2026 against Q2 2025, not a July figure, and it jumped from 6.6% in the previous quarter.
• Canada: 16.6%, up from 14.3% in June. Canadian headline inflation is 3.0%, so energy is running more than five times the general rate.
• United States: 14.7%, down from 15.7%. These components are OECD estimates from the CPI for All Urban Consumers rather than the official BLS breakdown, which the OECD flags in its own footnotes.
• United Kingdom: 9.8%, up from 5.7% in June. The OECD attributes the jump to a rise in the energy price cap.
• Ireland: 6.8%, and this one went the other way, down from 10.1% in June.
• Australia: 1.8%, down from 3.8%. Australia is the genuine exception in the table. Its components use the Australian classification rather than the international one, so treat it as directional.

Two markets in that list have energy inflating at four to eight times their headline rate. One has energy running below its headline rate. Same month, same table. Whatever you read about "global energy prices" this week, the number that applies to you is your own.

Your customers think this is over, and they are half right

This is the part that makes 2026 harder to price than 2022.

Four years ago, everybody knew prices were rising. Your customer's own shopping, fuel and bills were all climbing, so a note on the counter saying costs had gone up landed as a fact. There was cover.

The cover has gone. Food inflation across the OECD is 3.2% and falling. Core is flat. The average customer's own basket is calming down, and their sense of "is it normal for prices to rise right now" is calming with it. Meanwhile the line hitting you hardest is one they never see on a receipt.

So the instinct to write "due to rising costs" on a price list is now working against you. It sounds like the excuse everybody used in 2022, at a moment when your customer's own experience says the excuse expired. The rise still needs to happen. It just cannot be justified with a word that has stopped meaning anything.

It does not arrive monthly. It arrives on one date

Here is the mistake worth avoiding: these are CONSUMER price figures. They measure what households pay. They are not your tariff.

Ofgem's price cap, the thing the OECD names as the driver behind the UK's jump, is a domestic protection. Ofgem states it directly: you are not protected by the cap if you have a business energy contract. Most other markets work the same way, with household-facing regulation and a separate commercial market.

Which means your exposure to all of this is not a slow drip. It is a single date: the day your fixed-term contract ends and you are repriced into today's market in one step, or dropped onto a default rate that is usually the worst tariff your supplier sells.

So before anything else, go and find two things:

• The end date of your energy contract. Write it in your diary with a reminder three months earlier, because that is roughly when you can start locking a new rate rather than negotiating from a position of having no choice.
• Your annual usage in kilowatt hours, not just the amount you paid. Suppliers quote in unit rates and standing charges. If you only know the total on the bill, you cannot compare two offers, or tell whether it went up because prices rose or because you used more.

If your contract runs past next summer, most of this is a planning exercise. If it ends in the next six months, it is the most valuable hour of admin available to you right now.

What a 12% renewal actually costs, on your paper

Energy is a fixed cost. It does not fall when you are quiet, so every extra unit of it comes off net profit directly. That makes the arithmetic unusually simple, and unusually unforgiving.

Take your own annual energy spend. Call it E, in whatever currency you bill in. Say your renewal comes in 12% higher, which is roughly the middle of what the OECD is currently measuring.

• Extra cost per year: E x 0.12.
• Revenue needed to cover it at a 10% net margin: E x 1.2, because ten units of sales produce one unit of profit.
• At a 15% net margin: E x 0.8.

Put a real number in. On an energy bill of 6,000 a year, a 12% rise is 720 a year. At a 10% net margin, standing still means finding 7,200 of extra sales. That is not a rounding error in a business turning over a few hundred thousand. It is a few hundred extra covers, or a hundred extra appointments, bought with no extra profit at the end of it.

Now the version most owners get wrong. A 5% price rise on a service you sell often is worth more than the whole problem, because a price rise carries no extra cost with it. The break-even calculator will do this on your figures, and the pricing power calculator will tell you which of your services can actually carry it.

Three moves, in order of how much they return

Move one, and it is not the boiler. Reprice narrowly rather than across the board. A blanket 5% invites every customer to notice at once. A rise on your three highest-demand slots or services, the ones people book without asking the price, is often invisible and lands most of the money. How to raise prices covers the sequencing.

Move two: attack the standing charge and the unit rate separately. They are different numbers with different drivers, and quotes are usually compared on the unit rate alone. A supplier can undercut on units and take it back on a daily standing charge you never looked at. Ask for both, and multiply the standing charge by 365 before you decide.

Move three: switch off what you are paying to run at 2am. In a salon, cafe, gym or clinic, the base load, meaning what the meter is doing when the place is empty, is usually fridges, hot water, standby equipment and lighting nobody turns off. It is the cheapest saving available because it costs you no customers. A half-hourly reading from your supplier, or one evening with a plug meter, tells you where it goes.

What I would not lead with is capital spend. New equipment can be genuinely worth it, but it is a decision that needs your own payback sum against your own tariff, and the payback moves every time the tariff does. Get the contract, the price list and the base load sorted first, because those three cost almost nothing and work immediately.

The bit that follows you to the sale

One more reason not to just absorb this.

A buyer values your business off maintainable profit, usually as a multiple of it. So a permanent overhead increase does not cost you the increase. It costs you the increase multiplied.

That 720 a year from the example above, absorbed rather than recovered, is 720 off profit. On a valuation multiple of three, that is roughly 2,160 off the price of your business, for a bill you never renegotiated. Absorb a few of those over a few years and the "small" decisions have quietly repriced the whole thing.

There is a subtler version too. Two businesses with identical profit are not worth the same if one of them has an energy contract expiring next month and no idea what its base load is, and the other has a fixed rate locked for two years and a meter it reads. The second one is forecastable. The first one is a question mark in diligence, and question marks come out of the price. Our profit margin guide and the valuation calculator are the quick way to see where you sit.