There was a time when inflation was seen mainly as a poor man’s problem. Today, it has entered the drawing rooms of the salaried class, the small business owner, the young professional, the retired parent, and the family that once considered itself comfortably middle class. The crisis is no longer limited to whether people can buy wheat, sugar or petrol. The real crisis is that Pakistan is becoming too expensive to live in.

This is not just a feeling. The numbers now confirm what households have been saying for months. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, CPI inflation increased by 11.1 per cent year-on-year in June 2026, compared with 3.2 per cent in June 2025. Urban inflation stood at 11.2 per cent and rural inflation at 10.9 per cent. More importantly, the items that dominate household budgets – food, housing, electricity, gas, transport, education and health – are the very items where families have the least flexibility. You can delay a phone upgrade. You cannot delay school fees, rent, medicine, electricity bills or kitchen expenses.

The official average inflation for FY2025-26 stood at 7.05 per cent. That number may look manageable on paper, but it does not fully capture the pain of a household that has already absorbed the inflation shock of the last few years. A family does not reset its memory every fiscal year. It remembers that school fees have gone up, electricity bills have become unpredictable, medicines are costlier, rent has risen, transport is expensive, and groceries that once filled a trolley now barely fill a few bags.

This is why the phrase ‘inflation is coming down’ no longer comforts people. Inflation coming down does not mean prices are coming down. It only means prices are rising more slowly. For ordinary households, the damage has already been done.

The most dangerous impact is on the middle class. In Pakistan, the middle class was never rich. It was simply the class that could educate children, pay rent or instalments, afford basic healthcare, save a little, attend family weddings, and occasionally upgrade its lifestyle. That fragile comfort is now being dismantled.

A household earning Rs300,000 to Rs500,000 per month may sound comfortable on paper. But after rent or home instalment, school fees, fuel, electricity, groceries, medical expenses,........

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