Across eleven markets, medical costs are projected to rise several times faster than general prices — and education sits in between

Ask how fast prices are rising and most people quote one figure: the headline consumer price index. That number is the right anchor for groceries, utilities and most of a household’s spending. It is the wrong anchor for school fees and hospital bills, which in almost every economy rise faster — and which are exactly the costs families most often save for in advance.

This report sets out the three inflation rates Nivritee projects with for each of the eleven markets it plans for, where each comes from, and what the gap between them does over a planning horizon. Every figure in the table below is the product’s own default, so the rates you read here are the rates a plan starts with.

The rates, market by market

General inflation: the central bank’s target

For everyday prices the defaults use the rate each central bank is mandated or committed to steer toward, rather than whatever the last few years happened to print. Over a plan that runs for decades, the target is the better anchor. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan each aim at 2%³¹¹¹²⁹. The Bank of Canada targets the 2% midpoint of a 1–3% range⁴, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand works to a 1–3% range too⁶. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s band is 2–3%, so its default takes the 2.5% midpoint⁵.

India’s 4% is the target the government has set the RBI, with a tolerance band of 2–6%, retained in March 2026 for the five years to March 2031². Three markets have no formal inflation target, and their defaults say so. Singapore’s MAS manages the exchange rate to keep core inflation low, and the default uses 2.0%⁷. Hong Kong’s dollar is linked to the US dollar⁸, importing US policy while local costs run hotter, so its default is 2.5%¹. Bank Negara Malaysia pursues price stability without a numerical target; the default is 2.5%¹⁰¹.

Why medical costs compound faster

The medical column comes from WTW’s 2026 Global Medical Trends Survey of insurers, which projects the cost of employer medical benefits rising 10.3% globally in 2026: 14.0% in Asia Pacific, 9.2% in North America and 8.2% in Europe¹³. That is a benefit cost trend — what claims cost per insured person — not the medical line of the consumer price index. It includes people using more care and more expensive treatments, not only higher prices for the same visit, which is why it runs well above CPI and why it is the more useful figure for a family budgeting for its own healthcare.

The consumer price index tells the same story more quietly. In the United States, the medical care index rose about 80% between January 2005 and January 2025, against about 66% for all items¹⁴¹⁵. Japan is the deliberate exception in the table: its default of 5.0% sits well below the Asia Pacific trend of 14.0%, because a regional figure of that size does not fit an economy that spent two decades near zero inflation¹¹³.

Why education does too

There is no comparable multi-country education price series, so the education column is derived: headline inflation plus a spread of one to four points, widest where schooling and higher education are mostly private and narrowest where they are mostly state-funded¹. India’s 8.0% is its 4.0% general rate plus four points; Japan’s 3.0% is its 2.0% plus one¹. The direction is well established even where the size is a judgement: in the United States, the price index for tuition, other school fees and childcare roughly doubled between January 2005 and January 2025, rising about 105% while all prices rose about 66%¹⁶¹⁵.

What a few points do over fifteen years

Fifteen years is a typical distance to a child’s university fees, or from a mid-career decision to the first years after work stops. Compounded over that span, the gap between rates becomes a gap between multiples. At 4% a year a cost grows to about 1.80 times today’s figure; at 7% to about 2.76 times; at 8% to about 3.17 times; and at 12% to about 5.47 times¹.

• At India’s defaults, ₹10 lakh of everyday spending today becomes about ₹18.0 lakh in fifteen years at 4.0%¹.
• The same ₹10 lakh of school and college fees becomes about ₹31.7 lakh at 8.0%¹.
• And ₹10 lakh of medical costs becomes about ₹54.7 lakh at 12.0% — three times the general figure from the same start¹.

A plan that inflates everything at the general rate understates the education goal by roughly 43% and the medical cost by roughly two-thirds in that example¹. Those are the two costs least likely to be optional when they arrive.

Projecting each cost at its own rate

The practical fix is simple to describe: tag every cost with the kind of inflation that drives it, and project each one at its own rate. That is how Nivritee’s projection works. Each expense row and each life goal carries an inflation class — general, education or medical — and every year of the projection inflates it at that class’s rate as a running price level, so a high-inflation stretch leaves prices permanently higher. A cost in another of the eleven markets rises at that country’s own rates, so UK school fees in a plan settling in India move at UK education inflation, adjusted for the inflation gap between the two countries.