Baltic Basket · method

Back to the figures

How Baltic Basket works

Baltic Basket answers one question: what does everyday life cost in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia? This page explains where those numbers come from, and what we refuse to do to get them.

Built from the data file published on 2026-10-18 00:10 UTC.

Every number can be checked

Each figure carries four things: the source with its web address, the moment we read it, a method page like this one, and the open data file behind it. If any of the four is missing, the figure has no business being on the site.

What counts as a source

We use national statistics offices, regulators, the European Commission and the exchanges where energy is actually traded. Nothing here is scraped from a shop, a price comparison site or a classified-ads portal.

What we will not do

  • We never invent a number or a date. If a source does not say which period a figure describes, the figure is not published at all.
  • We do not use listing portals. An asking price is what someone hopes to get, not what anyone paid, and those sites forbid this use in their terms.
  • We do not guess at future prices. Tomorrow's electricity price is the result of an auction that has already closed — a settled fact, not a guess.
  • We never say anything about a named shop, landlord or supplier. Everything here is an official average, an index or an approved tariff.
  • We do not work around bot protection, logins or paywalls. When a source is closed to us, that country is marked as having no data and stays empty.
  • We never blend two different things into one number to fill a hole, and we never copy one country's figure into another.

When a source is late

Every figure shows the date it describes, not the day we fetched it. We work out its age ourselves, so a module cannot declare itself fresh. Past twice the expected age it is marked as old. If a fetch fails we keep the last good figure with its original date and mark the module as not updated — an old number never gets today's date.

Gaps, and countries with nothing

No data is not zero. Where a source published nothing, the gap stays a gap and is listed; we never draw a line through it. Where a country has no usable figure we say so and leave it empty.

Why two countries often cannot be compared

Each statistics office prices its own products in its own pack sizes, and each country taxes them differently. Where that makes a side-by-side reading misleading, the module page says so in plain words rather than quietly lining the numbers up.

One page for each thing we measure

Follow a module to see its sources, its tax basis, its gaps and its limits.

Home heatingup to date · 2026-09-30 · once a month · No data: LTFood shoppingup to date · 2026-09-30 · once a month · Partly covered: EEFirewood and pelletsup to date · 2026-10-06 · once a weekElectricityup to date · 2026-10-18 · every hourFilling the carup to date · 2026-10-12 · once a weekGasup to date · 2026-06-30 · twice a yearRentup to date · 2026-09-30 · once a monthWater, refuse and building feesnot updated · 2026-08-31 · once a monthWhere this sits in its own historyup to date · 2026-10-15 · every day

Licence

The text and figures on these pages are CC BY 4.0. The underlying data belongs to the bodies named on each module page, under their own terms, which are listed there.

No cookies, no tracking, no third-party requests. Your country and language choice stays in your own browser.

The whole site is one open file: