Amir used to enjoy visiting the Symposium Restaurant, a smart outlet in northern Tehran serving French-style patisserie and pasta alfredo alongside live music performances.
But since the start of this year, costs have gone up so much that he can no longer afford such outings.
A coffee at Symposium that five months ago cost 115,000 tomans ($0.67) is now 180,000 tomans ($1.03), a 56 per cent increase.
Prices may seem low compared to western or regional salaries but in Iran, where most of the population lives on a few hundred dollars a month, it’s another blow in a prolonged cost-of-living crisis.
“We’ve limited our budget to food, petrol and medicine,” Amir, a resident of the Iranian capital, told The National. “It’s a feeling of disappointment and despair, and hopelessness for the future.” Like others, he spoke using a pseudonym over security fears around talking to foreign media.
For Iranians of all the political persuasion, life is becoming expensive, sometimes ruinously so.
Inflation was already in the high double digits before the war with the US and Israel, and the continuing conflict has only made things worse.
The International Monetary Fund is predicting inflation of 68.9 per cent for 2026, the highest figure since the 1979 revolution. The cost of many food items has already doubled or tripled over the past 12 months.
While Iranians do not report significant shortages resulting from the conflict, fewer can afford the goods on sale as prices have continued to rise.
“The main problem is no longer supply but rapidly eroding purchasing power,” the World Food Programme (WFP) said in its latest report on the fallout from the Iran war, published on May 21.
Tehran resident
Inflation and deteriorating living conditions in Iran have long been a driver of major protests, most recently at the end of December. Demonstrations by shopkeepers over a sharp fall in the value of the Iranian rial against the dollar spiralled into the country’s largest protest movement in decades.
It prompted a deadly crackdown by security forces that left at least 7,000 people dead, according to human rights monitors outside the country. Other reports put the death toll many times higher.
The middle classes like Amir are less well off, while those who were already disadvantaged are slipping further into poverty and cutting back on food, people said.
“Spending on certain items has been erased,” Amir said. “In the past it was work stuff, things like laptops and hard drives, and now we’ve got to the stage where it’s basic commodities.”
As the world watches incremental progress in negotiations between Tehran and Washington to bring the war to an end, Iranians are focusing on their budgets. Added to huge inflation are massive job losses since the fighting started and a state-imposed internet blackout that has led to lost income for online businesses. Internet services returned this week but some firms warned of irreparable damage.
Kaveh, from a city in southern Iran, said there was a class of people who still had enough disposable income for trips out, but many have cut back since the war started.
resident of southern Iran
“You can't say the cafes have got loads quieter, because the sort of people who've always gone to cafes have generally always had money,” he told The National. “But a lot of people like me go less often now.”
Coping strategies as grocery costs soar
Kaveh has also tried to cut back on his grocery shopping. “I even put fewer things in my trolley at the supermarket,” he said. He is not the only one.
Donyaye Eghtesad, a daily economic newspaper, reported that the cost of feeding a family of four for a month would consume 66 per cent of a minimum wage earner’s pay, up from 48 per cent last year.
The minimum monthly income for a married worker with two children is about 26 million tomans ($150), taking into account a minimum wage of 16.6 million tomans and various additional benefit allowances.
During the Iranian month of Farvardin 1405, equivalent to March 21 to April 20, 2026 in the Gregorian calendar, inflation increased “significantly” compared to the same period last year, Donyaye Eghtesad said, citing figures from Iran’s official statistics agency. “Some food items have tripled in price,” it added, including staples such as cooking oil and rice.
The WFP's price index shows huge year-on-year rises in food costs: the price of red meat soared 270 per cent from 740,000 tomans per kilogram in May 2025, to two million tomans this month. Eggs and rice have tripled in price.
The National independently checked the prices of 10 basic products on May 21, including rice, cooking oil, minced meat, yoghurt and tomatoes, with delivery set to a Tehran address on the online grocery store Okala. Other online grocery sites were not accessible from outside Iran.
The basket total, containing enough food to feed a family of four for less than a week, came to 3,939,850 tomans. While online delivery services often charge a premium for convenience, two Iranians said the prices were within the expected range.
A 1.35 litre bottle of cooking oil cost 694,500 tomans, around $3.88. The Iranian government removed exchange-rate subsidies on the key ingredient in many of the stews, soups and stove-top dishes that typify Iranian cuisine in January, increasing prices. It instead started providing one million tomans monthly to every Iranian citizen to buy basic commodities, a system known as kala barg.
But the benefit is worth only $5.75 a month and is barely enough to buy two kg of rice.
The scheme may be “insufficient to offset rising costs”, the UN said in a report at the end of March.
Iranians, especially those on fixed incomes and without access to foreign currency, are feeling the price increases.
Protein sources in particular have become extremely expensive. Red meat has been “wiped off many families’ tables”, said Farhad, a resident of a city in central Iran.
A 500g pack of veal mince on Okala was 1,366,500 tomans, around $7.40. By comparison, the same product imported from Pakistan at Carrefour online in the UAE costs Dh21, around $5.70.
Those who cannot afford meat have replaced it with animal bones to make soups and broths, a Tehran-based businessman told The National. “They use it to cook with,” he said.
Other habits have changed, too: some in the capital head to southern Tehran, where prices are often lower than in the city’s upmarket northern districts. Others are paying for purchases in installments, while many are eating and buying less. “Now that [other] food is more expensive, people are eating more bread,” the businessman added.
State-linked media has been reporting on prices of goods that have fallen. “Prices have dropped by about 10,000 tomans every day in the past few days,” the Fars news agency, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, cited a chicken seller in Tehran as saying on Monday.
But for every commodity that appears to fall in price by a few cents, others rise at a faster rate than any decrease.
On the same day, the Iranian Dairy Industry Association announced price increases, following a rise of 30 per cent in the cost of raw milk. “The price of dairy products has increased several times in the past year, by about 90 per cent,” Shargh newspaper, associated with Iran’s reformist political movement, reported.
The government has been able to prevent major food shortages because of strategic reserves of commodities built up before the conflict, the Tehran-based businessman said. “They knew that war was possible so they prepared for this beforehand,” he said.
Why is inflation rising so much?
Iranians have long battled high inflation, a result of strict international sanctions that limit access to foreign currency and push up the cost of imports, fuelling persistent budget deficits and low confidence in the economy.
The war with the US and Israel has exacerbated these factors. In addition, physical damage to Iran's steel and plastic manufacturing sectors has curbed supply of those materials, prompting an inflationary multiplier effect throughout the economy.
Iran was the 10th largest global steel producer in 2024, with an output of 31.4 million tonnes, according to the World Steel Association. In April, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed 70 per cent of the Iran's steel production capacity had been eliminated and confirmed strikes on petrochemical plants, too.
That damage has caused prices of other goods to rise for the Iranian public.
“If you have to replace a fridge, a washing machine, or dishwasher, those are things that are generally domestically produced in Iran using Iranian steel, so that's going to be a problem if you have this kind of impact on steel production,” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, the London-based chief of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, an economic think tank, told The National.
The strikes on petrochemical plants are linked to price rises of fast-moving consumer goods such as food because “everything is packaged in plastic”, he added.
Impact of US blockade
The US imposed a blockade on Iran's southern ports in early April, in response to failed talks to end the war and as Iran restricted traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran is still able to trade goods across its land borders with neighbours such as Pakistan and Turkey, so the US blockade has not entirely besieged its economy.
Pakistan eased overland trade with Iran, aiming to facilitate commerce across central Asia. There are three open and active borders between Turkey and Iran, although exports into Iran actually decreased in the first four months of 2026 compared to the same period the previous year, from $944 million to $803 million, Turkish data showed. This indicates that the trade relationship is not compensating for port closures on Iran's southern shores.
But a US blockade of Iran’s southern ports and general trade disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has had an impact on imports of raw materials, especially of machinery and car parts, further pushing up prices.
The effects on Iranians of disruption at sea were not imminent but have started to take their toll, people said.
“Automotive equipment and imported tech items have become very scarce and extremely expensive,” Farhad said.
Pouya, another Iranian in Tehran, said he had been trying to buy a new car but price increases became too much of a barrier. “The price of cars has gone up so much that I gave up,” he said.
Iranian car review website Khodrobank said this week that price surges would force drivers to “hold on to their current, worn-out vehicles”. It said the price of a Peugeot 207, at 1.5 billion tomans ($8,645) showed how pricing mechanisms and supply chain costs need “fundamental and urgent review”.
Overall, significant economic uncertainty is feeding into Iran's approach to negotiations to end the conflict, Mr Batmanghelidj said.
“In the short term, Iran can keep limping along,” he said. “But in the medium to long term, this fragility is a problem for Iran, and they need to try to avoid getting to a point where these problems become sort of intractable.”
For Amir, living through yet another round of price hikes with no clear end in sight is exhausting.
“This feeling repeats itself over and over again,” he said.
