THE MONTHLY INDEX

What a month costs in Syria

The same handful of numbers every month: what a household of five must spend to get by, what the wage floor is, and what the state-subsidised loaf actually weighs. Where the data does not exist, we leave the space empty and say why.

Updated: 27 July 2026 Download cost-of-living.json

Latest citable reading

2,653,738

old SYP · per month · March 2026

≈ $227 at the official rate

times the public sector minimum wage

2.1×

The basket figure is March 2026 and the wage floor is May 2026. The ratio mixes two dates and is indicative only.

since December 2025

+20.6%

WFP reports the cost of living was broadly stable month-on-month in May 2026, and 19% higher than a year earlier.

THE MONTHLY INDEX

Minimum Expenditure Basket, national average

Old Syrian pounds per month for a household of five, with the USD equivalent at the official rate. Two citable observations — not yet a trend.

  1. December 2025 2,200,000 ≈ $206
  2. March 2026 2,653,738 ≈ $227
  3. May 2026 no absolute figure published —

No absolute SYP figure for May 2026 was retrievable from a public source. We publish the direction and the year-on-year change, not an invented level.

Two verified readings three months apart. They are drawn as two bars rather than a line, because a line between two points implies a trend the data does not support.

Note: The Minimum Expenditure Basket is what WFP costs as the minimum a household of five needs each month to cover food and essential non-food items. It is not a poverty line and it is not an inflation index.

Source: World Bank, Macro Poverty Outlook — Syrian Arab Republic, April 2026 ; WFP, via The Syria Report Sourced

View data
Month Old SYP USD Verification
December 2025 2,200,000 $206 verified
March 2026 2,653,738 $227 verified
May 2026 — — not published

What a month costs

Every figure here carries its own source and date. Nothing is modelled, averaged or filled in.

Public sector minimum wage

12,560

new SYP · effective May 2026 · +50%

Set by presidential decree, effective 1 May 2026. Follows a 400% increase in February 2025 that took the floor from roughly 2,800 to roughly 12,000 new pounds.

Xinhua Estimate

The loaf is the tell

40

new SYP · ≈ $0.30

1,200g 1,050g

10 loaves 8 loaves

Price unchanged through 2026 — but the bundle has shrunk twice. Weight cut from 1,200g to 1,050g on 9 May 2026, then the loaf count cut from ten to eight on 20 June 2026. A flat price line here is not a flat cost of living.

Enab Baladi Estimate

Damascus, Aleppo, Homs

Unverified figure

Not published

WFP collects the Minimum Expenditure Basket per governorate and The Syria Report charts it monthly, but the per-governorate breakdown sits behind a subscription and WFP's own bulletins publish it only inside monthly PDFs. We have not been able to assemble a free, citable Damascus / Aleppo / Homs series, so this chart is empty rather than estimated.

What would fix it: A monthly reading of the three governorate figures from the WFP bulletin, transcribed with the issue number. That is a fifteen-minute job each month and it is on our list.

The Syria Report — MEB per governorate

The household context

  • 90% Households struggling to meet basic needs World Bank, Macro Poverty Outlook, April 2026
  • 20.9% Poverty rate at the $3.00/day line, 2025 Source
  • 46.8% Poverty rate at the $4.20/day line, 2025 Source
  • — WFP food assistance halved; bread subsidy programme halted Funding shortfall, not a change in need. Removes a buffer that was holding the effective cost of a month down for the households least able to absorb it. Al-Monitor

What we don't know

  • There is no free, continuous, city-level basket series for Syria. Everything published at governorate level is either paywalled or locked inside monthly PDFs.
  • The two national MEB observations we can cite are three months apart. Two points is not a trend, and we do not draw one.
  • The minimum wage figure is May 2026 and the latest citable basket figure is March 2026. Any ratio between them mixes dates and is presented here with that caveat attached, not as a clean monthly indicator.
  • Prices in local markets diverge sharply from official rates, and the divergence is itself unmeasured in public data.
  • No national metered series exists for electricity supply hours, so the energy component of a household month cannot be costed.

A note on the currency

Syria redenominated on 1 January 2026: 100 old Syrian pounds became 1 new pound. Sources published before that date quote old pounds and sources after it quote new pounds. Every figure below is stored in OLD pounds so the series is comparable across the redenomination, with the new-pound value shown alongside where a source published one. Getting this wrong by a factor of 100 is the single easiest mistake to make with Syrian price data.