As inflation erodes purchasing power, more Iranians are buying food and everyday necessities on credit, locking future wages into an expanding cycle of debt.
Iran’s misery index—the combined unemployment and inflation rates—reached 91.1 percent in spring 2026, almost double the 46.3 percent recorded in spring 2025. These figures are based on data from the Statistical Center of Iran, an institution that has itself been accused of artificially understating economic indicators.
The Statistical Center put the unemployment rate for spring 2026 at 9.1 percent and reported that the number of employed people had fallen by 450,000 between spring 2025 and spring 2026. The secretary of the Insurance and Tax Commission at Iran’s Chamber of Commerce has said that the real unemployment rate is five times the official figure.
Official figures put the rise in the general price level at 82 percent in June 2026; a year earlier, the official inflation rate had been reported at 39 percent. Yet people living in Iran say the inflation they actually experience is higher than the official figures suggest. Nasim, who lives in Iran, agrees: “Just filling one person’s stomach costs more than 10 million tomans.”
In June 2026, the monthly cost of a minimum subsistence basket for one person was estimated at 7,840,555 tomans. On that basis, a three-person household needed to spend 24.3 million tomans a month on food alone—130 percent of what it had spent on food in June 2025 and 6.2 percent more than in May 2026.
The latest estimate by EcoIran shows that by July 2026, the cost of the food basket for one person had risen above eight million tomans—to 8.202 million. A three-person household needed around 30 million tomans a month for food, more than the minimum wage for workers. In other words, the cost of basic subsistence had risen by 129 percent in a single year.
Nasim, an engineer at an industrial company who says she “doesn’t have to worry about rent,” says even this amount covers little more than “filling your stomach.” To eat a nutritionally adequate diet, particularly one containing enough protein, she estimates that a person would need to spend “at least five to ten million tomans” more than the official estimate.
On August 5, 2026, Eghtesad News reported the return of the old shop credit ledger, describing it as an increasingly common phenomenon. The report said it was “not limited to supermarkets. In some neighborhoods, small shops, household-goods stores, local service providers, and even some pharmacies are encountering customers asking to pay later.”
Saeed, who had gone to Mahshahr for work before the Israeli and U.S. military attack on Iran, has now been unemployed for some time and spends every day at his father’s shop. He says that almost every day “three or four people come in to shop who cannot even afford to pay cash for a liter of cooking oil.”
During the past few weeks, while spending several hours a day in the shop, he has seen “families who even buy their children’s snacks on installments.” He says people are “buying much less,” something he has noticed from “the volume of orders and the expiration dates on food products with a limited shelf life.”
Before losing his job, whenever Saeed returned from Mahshahr he would go out with friends to a traditional restaurant almost every evening. “Now I even have to think twice about whether I can afford cigarettes.”
He is approaching 40 and still lives with his parents. “It is very hard at this age to have your expenses paid by a father who has grown old and should be resting by now.”
On August 8, 2026, Mahmoud Oulad, an economics lecturer in Iran whom the media describe as a housing-market expert, told Donya-ye Eqtesad: “As people become poorer, the quality and quantity of food and clothing change.” According to him, the fact that people have reduced the amount of meat and chicken in their diets “is not a ‘food crisis’; it is a crisis of declining income and poverty.”
Buying on Credit Is Not a Choice, but a Necessity
The growth of installment buying can also be seen in the expansion of “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) platforms that allow people to purchase food and other everyday goods on credit. SnappPay offers up to 50 million tomans in credit for daily purchases, repayable in four installments. Digikala offers customers up to 200 million tomans in credit, repayable over 12 months with interest. The interest on a one-year, 200-million-toman Digikala credit line is approximately 55 million tomans.
Snapp’s annual report for 2025–26 said that 13.5 million people were registered with SnappPay, of whom 3.5 million were active users. A report published by ITResan in August 2026 found that during the 39-day war, purchases in the clothing category fell by 42 percent, digital goods by 54 percent, and beauty and health products by 44 percent. More significantly, daily orders using the monthly-credit service fell by 56 percent, while orders through the four-installment service dropped by 54 percent.
The deputy director for research at the Central Bank’s Monetary and Banking Research Institute has confirmed the rise of BNPL services, although he said the practice has not yet achieved significant “depth.” According to him, credit payments through online platforms have grown considerably in recent years.
Hossein Soltankhah, described by the Iranian Students News Agency as a labor-market expert, attributed the growth of credit purchases to “economic instability and high inflation.” He said: “With inflation above 50 percent, preserving the value of money has become difficult for many households, and their ability to make purchases in cash has sharply declined.”
He described the way online platforms operate as emptying customers’ pockets:
This online platform gives you credit without requiring a cheque or promissory note. But in return, its affiliated stores empty your pockets with astronomical prices. It is a lose-lose game for the customer: you buy an ordinary product at the price of a luxury item and end up in debt as well.
A Tehran resident confirmed this problem in an interview with the Iranian Labour News Agency: “You might be able to find the same product cheaper somewhere else, but because you cannot pay for it all at once, you are forced to overlook the higher price and buy only from stores affiliated with these platforms.”
A journalist in Tehran also told ILNA: “Around 40 percent of my income goes toward rent, and another 30 to 40 percent goes toward paying installments to platforms such as SnappPay and DigiPay.”
She said rising food prices were the reason she had turned to these services, explaining that she mainly used them for “basic food items and taxi fares on days when I absolutely need them. Using them repeatedly has created a cycle of debt for me. Part of every month’s salary goes to paying off the previous month’s installments. I can never put anything aside for an emergency or an illness.”
Falling Into the Debt Trap
Buying on credit—and paying off debt to one platform by taking credit from another—has trapped many customers in cycles of debt. Shayan is one of them. ILNA quoted him as saying:
It has reached the point where we even pay for food from restaurants and cafés in installments. This was a new frontier of crisis that we crossed in 2026. On average, I pay four to five million tomans a month, and sometimes more than ten million, just in installments for these everyday purchases.
Economists and labor activists have warned about this debt trap. On August 6, 2026, economist Sadegh Sepandar told Eghtesad News: “People are taking out credit with inflation at 40 percent and interest rates of up to 35 percent, forgetting that the debt still has to be repaid.” He warned that without regulation, a domino-like crisis could eventually engulf the entire banking system.
Economic researcher Shahram Eydizadeh also warned on August 1, 2026, that consumers “ignore the negative impact that installment repayments will have on their future budgets; as a result, the pressure of debt and monthly payments remains long after the purchase itself.”
A striking image of this reality can be found in advertisements for gravestones sold on installment plans, now common near cemeteries. Even the surviving relatives of those who die can remain trapped in debt and poverty.
Nasim describes their situation simply as misery. These days, she turns a line from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Death on Credit on its head: “He said that sometimes you can tell pleasant stories; life isn’t all misery. But for us, there is nothing pleasant left to tell. We live on installments all the way to death…”
