Petrol and rent push inflation up for a second month as Godongwana tables his budget

South Africa’s annual consumer inflation rose to 4.5% in September 2026, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday, the second straight monthly increase and a reading that lands hours before Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tables the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement.

The figure climbed from 4.4% in August and 4.3% in July. Between August and September the index itself rose 0.4%, after no change at all between July and August.

Three categories did most of the work. Transport ran at 10.8% and contributed 1.5 percentage points to the annual rate. Housing and utilities ran at 5.2% and contributed 1.3 percentage points. Insurance and financial services ran at 5.4% and contributed 0.6 of a percentage point.

Those three are where a household’s month actually goes. Transport is the fare to work and the tank that gets the children to school. Housing and utilities are the rent and the lights. Together they account for 3.4 of the 4.5 percentage points, which is why a headline number that moved by a tenth of a percent is being felt as something larger at the till and on the forecourt.

Nedbank had expected worse. In its Weekly Monitor commentary dated 17 October 2026, the bank forecast headline consumer inflation to accelerate from 4.4% in August to 4.8% in September, with higher transport costs the main driver. Petrol prices rose 5.3% month on month, it said, after global oil prices jumped about 14.1% and the rand depreciated about 1.7% against the US dollar. On that basis Nedbank expected fuel inflation to rise from 20% to around 27%.

The bank also expected food inflation to continue its moderate increase off a low base, and said the contribution from housing and utilities would rise, driven by actual rentals for housing and owners’ equivalent rent, as well as wages for domestic workers and public transport fares surveyed in September. It expected core inflation to firm from 4.0% to 4.4% as the indirect effects of higher fuel costs filtered through to a broader range of goods and services.

The actual September print came in below Nedbank’s 4.8% forecast. The bank’s commentary was a forecast published four days before the data, and the figures that matter are the ones Stats SA released on Wednesday.

The timing is the political fact. The CPI release precedes Godongwana’s Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement on Wednesday afternoon, the half-yearly update in which the Treasury sets out its revised fiscal projections and spending priorities. Inflation at 4.5%, with fuel and rent leading, is the backdrop against which that statement will be read, and the question the document has to answer is what it does for households carrying both.

This report is based on the SAnews account of the Statistics South Africa release and Nedbank’s published commentary, and not on the underlying statistical release itself. The original SAnews report is at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/cpi-rises-september.