The Condom Price Index: condoms vs inflation

The pink line barely has a story to tell, which is the story. From 2015 to 2021 it doesn’t move a full percentage point in either direction. There’s one visible step, in 2022, when the SKYN range lifted its prices, and then nothing again, four straight years of flat, while the grey line above it climbs through the worst inflation in three decades. Add the whole run together and the listed price of a condom is about 4% higher than in 2015, against roughly 36% for everything else. Very little in the chemist aisle can match that.

One wrinkle sits between the sticker and the register. What you actually paid rose a little faster than the list price did, because the discounting has thinned. In the mid 2010s the typical captured price sat about 13% below list, and in recent years it’s nearer 7%, the same products simply spending less of the year on special. The sticker held. The specials shrank.

Karex Bhd is a Malaysian company most people have never heard of. It makes roughly one in every five condoms on earth, around five billion a year, and supplies brands including Durex. In April 2026 its chief executive, Goh Miah Kiat, told Bloomberg the company may be forced to raise prices by as much as 30%. The war in Iran had pushed up the cost of nearly everything a condom is made from. The oil-derived chemicals in latex and lubricant, the foil in the wrapper, the freight that carries it all. Karex’s own production costs had already climbed by a quarter to a third before the warning went public.

Two things are worth holding onto. First, it’s a forecast, and our most recent shelf data shows no sign of it landing in Australia yet. Second, it arrives after the decade in the chart above. The industry issuing the warning has spent ten years not raising prices. When a sector with that record says it can no longer hold the line, the warning deserves to be taken at face value.

We can also name who’s most exposed, because Australia’s therapeutic goods register records who actually manufactures each condom. Karex makes Moments and Sax for the Australian market, supplies Durex, and makes Trojan products for the US. SKYN and LifeStyles come out of a different factory, Suretex in Thailand, and Four Seasons doesn’t publish its maker. There’s an irony in that list. The brands most exposed to Karex are the flattest lines in the charts below, and the lines that have actually moved this decade belong to brands Karex doesn’t make. One caution, though. Every factory buys its synthetic rubber, foil and silicone oil in the same global markets, so Karex is less a boundary around the problem than the first maker to say it out loud.

The steep pink line is the worst case, every cent of the 30% passed straight through. And here’s the striking part. Even that only draws condoms roughly level with inflation’s path. A decade of quiet real-terms savings would be handed back in a single step, but condoms would land about where they’d have been if they’d simply tracked inflation all along, not meaningfully above it. The middle line assumes roughly a third of the rise reaches the shelf, about 10%, which is closer to how supply shocks usually arrive at a register. On that path condoms stay comfortably below inflation and most of the decade’s gain survives.

In everyday terms, the median condom on this site costs $1.05 today. The worst case makes that $1.37. The partial case, about $1.16. We’re not predicting which path it takes, or that the brands move together, since the exposure differs maker by maker. But the prices on this site update daily, so whichever way it goes, this chart will show it happening.

Three of the four lines are so flat they’re hard to tell apart, and that’s the finding. Durex hasn’t moved the list price on Thin Feel since we first see it in 2017. Four Seasons has held Naked King Size at the same price per condom since 2019. LifeStyles Ultra Thin actually drifted a few cents cheaper when the range was repacked in 2019. The only line doing anything is SKYN, up from 85c to $1.00 per condom, an 18% climb across the decade that still trails inflation.

So is SKYN the entire story? Very nearly. Strip every SKYN product out and the market’s list prices climbed about 1.1% in the decade to 2025. One per cent, in ten years. The index’s only material moves are LifeStyles lifting its bulk 40 pack by 20% in 2021, and the SKYN range lifting its lines by 5 to 22% in 2022, which is the single step you can see in the headline chart. One thing the list-price record can’t yet confirm is LifeStyles’ newest supermarket pricing, where recent shelf prices point to a further move but no list price has been published for us to check it against. The LifeStyles line above stops in 2024 for the same reason.

At the shelf, all of that means the premium you pay is a choice about material and feel rather than a bet on which label held its prices. Every brand’s range, with its size names decoded into millimetres and its live prices, is on our brands page.

The latex benchmark has cost within a few cents of 58c a condom for eleven straight years. The non-latex benchmark started the decade at 85c and now sits at $1.00. If you can wear latex, the market has effectively been paying you to. If you can’t, because of an allergy or a strong preference, you carried the category’s entire price rise, and you were already paying a premium to begin with.

Worth knowing before you resent it, that premium is structural. Polyisoprene simply costs more to make than latex, and the gap has been there the whole decade rather than arriving as a recent squeeze. Every latex free condom sold in Australia is in the database with live prices, and if an allergy is what brought you here, the latex allergy guide walks through the options.

Fit first, and it’s free. The wrong width is the most expensive condom you can buy, whatever the sticker said, because half the box ends up abandoned in a drawer. Price buys thinness, texture or a material. It never buys more protection, since every condom sold in Australia meets the same standard. So spend nothing, take one measurement with the tape method in our measuring guide, and let the calculator turn it into your size. If your current condoms slip or pinch, that’s a width problem with a cheap fix, not a reason to spend more.

Then buy the biggest box you’ll actually finish. Price per condom falls steadily with pack size, and the cheapest condoms in our entire database are the 100 and 144 bulk boxes, which get down near a third of what the same money buys in 10 packs. One check before committing, though. Condoms keep for roughly 3 to 5 years from manufacture, so a bulk box only saves money if you’ll use it inside its expiry date. Buy the size that fits, in the biggest box you’ll realistically get through, and you’ve beaten every price rise in this article before it happens.