[PREVIEW] Norges Bank Policy Announcement at 09:00BST/ 04:00EDT on Thursday, 13th August 2026

The Norges Bank is expected to leave rates unchanged at 4.25%, with recent inflation prints backing market consensus.
June and July core inflation printed at 2.7% Y/Y, below the Norges Bank's 3.3% forecast.
Verbal guidance is likely to remain unchanged, particularly as this is an interim meeting.

OVERVIEW: Policymakers at the Norges Bank are expected to leave rates unchanged at 4.25% at its confab on Thursday 13th. Although guiding at May's meeting that it “will likely be necessary to raise the policy rate further at one of the forthcoming monetary policy meetings”, cooler-than-expected inflation will make it harder for hawkish members to push for a hike. Analysts at SEB and Nordea both expect the Bank to hold rates and the door to be left open for a September hike.

RECENT INFLATION DATA REINFORCES A HOLD: June’s core inflation, the preferred inflation metric, printed at 2.7% Y/Y, cooler than the Norges Bank’s 3.3%. Backing the June figure was another cool July print, which held steady at 2.7% Y/Y and below SEB’s 2.8% consensus. Food and other goods remained to be the key driver behind the low inflation, with core goods pricing increasing 0.3ppts M/M, and food increasing 3.6ppts, below SEB’s forecast of 1.1% and 4.2% respectively. However, headline inflation did tick higher to 3.0% Y/Y, but this was in line with consensus and remains below the Norges Bank’s 3.1% projection.

TOO EARLY TO ALTER GUIDANCE: Despite the recent comforting inflation prints, analysts at SEB think it is too early to shift guidance from indicating a rate hike to a more neutral stance. The uncertainty regarding the underlying trends come from the magnitude of the easing inflation. Nordea are also unconvinced that underlying price pressures are as weak as suggested, citing the base effects from last year’s reduction in kindergarten fees to feed into core inflation, adding c. 0.4ppts.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The announcement by the Norges Bank is expected at 09:00BST, with a press conference by Governor Bache due 30 minutes later. No updated projections to be given at this meeting, so focus will be on a statement adjustment, or verbal guidance from Bache. Market pricing implies 2bps worth of tightening this month.

Interim meetings at smaller central banks that carry no updated projections tend to trade on the statement and presser alone, and the established pattern is that a widely flagged hold with unchanged guidance produces only modest two-way moves in the currency and front end, since there is little new information to reprice. The live tension here is between guidance still pointing at a further hike and successive core prints running well below the bank's own forecast; in comparable episodes of this kind, the resolution has come not at the interim meeting but at the next full one with fresh projections, leaving the interim statement deliberately vague. The composition of the undershoot matters for that reading: goods and food doing the disinflationary work, with administered base effects flattering the core rate, is the profile hawks typically cite to argue underlying pressure is firmer than the headline miss suggests. The transmission channel is the gap between the bank's signalled path and market pricing of only a token amount of tightening: a hold that keeps the hiking bias intact validates that skew, while any softening of the forward sentence reprices it toward a done-hiking path, moving the krone through the front differential rather than the curve as a whole. The tells are the vote split, whether the hiking sentence survives, and how the Governor frames the data miss at the press conference, with the September meeting as the follow-on where a decision with new forecasts concentrates the risk.