Inflation is the single most important number for anyone living on cedis, and Ghana has a longer and worse history with it than almost anywhere in West Africa.

The series

Rate Year
Earliest observation 26.44% 1965
Peak 122.87% 1983
Lowest -8.42% 1967
Latest 14.2% 2025

122.87% in 1983 means prices roughly doubled in a year. That was the worst of a genuinely catastrophic period: a severe drought and bushfires wrecked the harvest, and around a million Ghanaians were expelled from Nigeria and arrived home to a country that could not feed them. The economic reforms that followed defined the next two decades of Ghanaian policy.

The -8.42% in 1967 is the opposite curiosity — prices actually falling, in the deflationary slump after the 1966 coup.

— The whole series, charted

What it means in practice

Double-digit inflation is not an abstraction. It changes how you should handle ordinary decisions:

  • A salary is a falling number. A raise below the inflation rate is a pay cut. Ghanaians negotiate more often than people from low-inflation countries expect, and that is why.
  • The rent advance gets worse. Handing over a year or two of rent in advance means the landlord holds cash that loses value — so landlords price that in, and ask for more. Inflation is one of the reasons the illegal advance persists.
  • Saving in cedis needs a rate above inflation or you are paying for the privilege. Compare the rate you are offered against the number in the table above, not against zero.
  • Quoted prices go stale fast. Every figure on this site carries the date it was checked and an expiry, which is a direct response to this series.

— What living in Accra costs — The rent advance, and the law on it — Opening a bank account

The cedi against the dollar

The exchange rate series runs from 1960 to 2025, and its recent end is the part you can actually use:

  • It reached 14.2 cedis to the dollar in 2024, the weakest in the record
  • It was 12.6 in 2025

Which means the cedi strengthened between those two years. That is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly, because a decade of one-way depreciation had trained everyone to assume the opposite.

Never compute a multiple across this series

The early years of the exchange-rate series are unusable, and the dashboard’s own arithmetic on it is meaningless. Two things happened:

  • Ghana changed currency in 1965, from the Ghanaian pound to the cedi.
  • Ghana went through a redenomination in July 2007, when 10,000 old cedis became 1 new Ghana cedi.

The series is expressed in today’s cedis throughout, so the 1960 figure is a fraction of a pesewa and comparing it to today produces a number in the hundreds of thousands. That number means nothing at all. Read the last twenty years and ignore the rest.

Why so many prices in Accra are quoted in dollars

Rents in Cantonments and Airport Residential, GIPC minimum capital requirements, immigration penalties, international school fees and a good deal of commercial rent are all quoted in US dollars even though you hand over cedis at the day’s rate.

That is not affectation. It is what a landlord or a school does when its costs are partly imported and the currency it collects has a history like the one in the table above. It also means your rent can rise in cedis without the landlord changing the price, which catches people out constantly.

— Sending money to Ghana — Mobile money

How to check the current rate

The figures here are annual averages from the World Bank and are the wrong tool for a transaction. For a rate today, use the Bank of Ghana interbank rate as the reference and expect to do slightly worse than it. Inflation is published monthly by the GSS, and the year-on-year headline rate is the one quoted in the news.

Neither is on this page, deliberately. A static site cannot publish a rate that moves daily and stay honest about it.

— Accra’s economy in numbers — How to read Ghanaian statistics — Money sent home to Ghana

World Bank Open Data, fetched 2026-09-10. Inflation is the annual consumer price index change; the exchange rate is the annual average.