Inflation held this morning. The Bank decides at noon tomorrow.

The figure landed at seven o'clock this morning. UK inflation held at 2.8 per cent in the year to May, the Office for National Statistics said — unchanged from April, and below the 3.0 per cent the City had pencilled in. After a spring when every forecast pointed up, a number that simply stayed put counts as relief.

It is a thin relief, and an uneven one. Transport was the largest upward push, with motor fuel still carrying the Iran war into the price of a commute; air fares and vehicle excise duty added to it. Pulling the other way, food inflation eased to 2.2 per cent, its lowest since late 2024, and the price of domestic heating oil fell back. So the headline held because cheaper food and heating offset costlier travel. Services inflation, the measure the Bank of England watches most closely because it reflects domestic costs rather than world prices, edged up to 3.7 per cent. That last number is the one that will be read around the table tomorrow.

Because tomorrow, at noon on Thursday 18 June, the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee announces its decision, and the base rate has sat at 3.75 per cent since late last year. A hold is widely expected. The drama, such as it is, lives in the arithmetic of the vote. In April the committee split eight to one, with the chief economist Huw Pill voting to raise rates — the first vote for an increase in nearly three years. The market is watching whether one dissenter becomes two or three. A hold with several members itching to hike reads very differently, for anyone who borrows, than a calm and united one.

Here is where it reaches you, mostly through debt and through savings. If you are on a tracker mortgage, tomorrow's decision moves your payment directly; a hold keeps it where it is. If you are coming off a fixed rate this year, the price of your next fix depends less on tomorrow's number than on what the committee signals about the months after it — and the signal, for now, is that cuts have been postponed, not cancelled. If you are a saver, the same stuck rate that frustrates borrowers is quietly working in your favour, for as long as it lasts.

And there is the slower channel, the one you do not watch: your pension. A higher-for-longer rate world changes the value of the gilts — UK government bonds — that sit inside most workplace and personal pensions, and it shapes the banks and housebuilders your fund holds on the FTSE. None of this asks a decision of you. It is simply where a rate decision in Threadneedle Street lands in an ordinary saver's account, often on a day they never noticed.

This is information, not advice. The honest summary is small and useful: inflation held this morning, a hold is expected tomorrow, and the part worth your attention is not the rate but the tone — how many on the committee now want to move, and which way.