The Daily.ky Cost of Living Index
One fixed basket of living costs, rent to groceries to fuel, priced every morning from Daily.ky’s own live data and weighted to the government’s CPI basket. Official inflation arrives quarterly, months late; this updates daily.
The Daily.ky Cost of Living Index prices a fixed month of living in the Cayman Islands every day, from the site’s own live data feeds: median long-term rent, CUC electricity rates, a 15-item staples grocery basket priced at Foster’s and Hurley’s, island-average self-serve petrol, FOI-verified SHIC health insurance premiums, and a fixed modest alcohol quantity (one bottle of spirits, two of wine and a case of beer for a single household; couple and family double) priced at the cheapest liquor store. As of 2026-09-21 the fixed monthly basket costs CI$3,046 for a single person in a one-bedroom, CI$4,979 for a couple in a two-bedroom and CI$6,515 for a family of four in a three-bedroom. The index stands at 100.5 (base 2026-09-08 = 100), up 1.1% over 30 days; the biggest 30-day mover is rent at +3.3%. Backfilled daily values reach to 1 June 2026.
Method: a chained Laspeyres over the single-household basket, weighted with the ESO’s own 2025 CPI basket sub-weights (actual rentals 87.333 per 1,000, electricity 44.340, food and non-alcoholic beverages 99.101, petrol 23.076, health insurance 49.9, alcoholic beverages 12.400), re-normalised over the roughly 32% of the official CPI basket these lines cover. Owner-occupier imputed rent and non-petrol transport are deliberately excluded. The official ESO CPI, published quarterly with a two-to-three-month lag, ran at 2.8% year on year in 2026-Q1 (all-items index 138.8); this index updates every morning. Not yet in the basket: water, internet and mobile, school fees, car ownership beyond fuel, and dining out. Daily and monthly figures are published as CSV at cost-index-daily.csv and cost-index-monthly.csv.
Frequently Asked Questions: Cayman Islands
How is the Daily.ky Cost of Living Index different from the ESO CPI?
The ESO's Consumer Price Index is the official measure: a much bigger basket, surveyed quarterly and published two to three months later. The Daily.ky index prices a smaller basket, about 32% of the CPI by weight, every single morning from live local prices, using the ESO's own 2025 basket weights for the lines it covers. Think of it as a daily, faster preview of the part of inflation you feel most directly; the official number remains the ESO's.
Why does the index start at 100 in September 2026?
The base day is 8 September 2026, the first day every component priced cleanly from live data, set to 100. Values before that are backfilled from Daily.ky's archived daily price snapshots back to 1 June 2026 and are charted in a lighter style; the covered basket stood about 4% higher in June than at base.
What is not in the cost of living basket?
Water, internet and mobile plans, school fees, car costs beyond fuel (purchase, insurance, maintenance), and dining out. These lack a live daily price feed so far, and the index only includes lines it can price every day. Alcohol is included as a fixed modest quantity, one bottle of spirits, two of wine and a case of beer a month for a single household, priced at the cheapest liquor store. Electricity assumes a typical air-conditioned household, 870 kWh a month for a 1-bed, rather than minimal usage. The covered share of the official CPI basket, about 32% by weight, is stated on the page.
Why is rent the biggest line in the index?
Because it is the biggest line in real budgets. In the ESO's 2025 CPI basket, actual rental payments carry 87.3 per 1,000, the largest weight of anything the index covers, and the median 1-bed asking rent alone is over half the single-household basket total. The index uses asking rents from live listings, which move earlier than the rents people already pay.
How often does the Cost of Living Index update?
Every morning at 6:40am Cayman time, after the day's fuel and grocery collections. A monthly close is recorded on the 1st, which becomes the monthly Cost of Living Report. If a feed fails, the affected line is flagged stale and carried forward rather than silently guessed.