Tea Price History: Monthly Global Price Since 1992

Tea is the world’s most consumed beverage after water, and the black-tea trade is dominated by Kenya, India, and Sri Lanka, priced largely through the Mombasa, Kolkata, and Colombo auctions. This dataset tracks the Mombasa/Nairobi auctions only, through the World Bank Pink Sheet price of African-origin tea (all tea), in US dollars per kilogram since 1992. Tea has no major futures market, and its price has moved in a much narrower range than coffee or cocoa.

Dataset: Tea Price (1992–2026) · Updated 2026-10-01

Data provided as is, with no warranty of accuracy or timeliness. Check any figure against the primary source cited on this page before using it. Terms: legal notice.

Source: World Bank, Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet) · CC BY 4.0

Macro Takeaway

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV and Excel files contain the following columns. Each row represents one calendar month.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats: monthly observations covering more than three decades.

Data provided as is, with no warranty of accuracy or timeliness. Check any figure against the primary source cited on this page before using it. Terms: legal notice.

Source Data Access: World Bank Pink Sheet

The underlying series is the “Tea, Mombasa” column of the Monthly Prices sheet in the World Bank’s Commodity Price Data, known as the Pink Sheet. The World Bank publishes it as a monthly Excel workbook on its commodity markets page, under a CC BY 4.0 licence that requires attribution to the World Bank.

The Eco3min dataset reproduces that column unmodified from January 1992, in US dollars per kilogram, in a stable CSV with a fixed column name for direct use in Python, R or any data pipeline. The URL never changes, which makes it suitable for automated scripts.

Direct CSV Access: Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/tea-price.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/tea-price.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

print(df.head())
print(df["tea_price"].describe())

df.plot(x="date", y="tea_price", title="Tea Price", legend=False)

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/tea-price.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$tea_price)

Both examples load the dataset directly from the URL, no download or API key required.

Methodology

The World Bank’s Pink Sheet reports the price of tea sold at the Mombasa/Nairobi auctions (African origin, all tea) in US dollars per kilogram, as the arithmetic average of weekly quotes. The Pink Sheet publishes Colombo, Kolkata and three-auction average prices in separate columns, which this file does not include.

Values are monthly averages, which smooth the week-to-week swings of auction results. The series begins in 1992.

An Eco3min pipeline on GitHub Actions reads the Pink Sheet workbook after each monthly release, keeps the column unmodified and regenerates the CSV, Excel and JSON files and the page metadata. The World Bank updates the Pink Sheet on the second business day of each month.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

The Pink Sheet price is a widely cited reference for the physical market. A few provider-specific points matter when using this series.

• Release latency. The World Bank publishes the Pink Sheet on the second business day of each month, with the average of the month just ended. Eco3min refreshes the file after each release. The series is not a real-time price.
• Monthly average vs auction results. This series is a monthly average of weekly quotes. It will differ from any single auction, and a monthly average necessarily understates intra-month peaks.
• Revisions. Prices are market-derived and are not revised like survey-based macro series, but the World Bank can correct recent months or replace a series, and it lists those changes in the notes of the Pink Sheet workbook.
• Source change on 30 September 2026. Until that date this file reproduced another publisher’s series for a different Kenyan tea grade, in US cents per kilogram; it now reproduces the Pink Sheet Mombasa auction column in US dollars per kilogram. Values downloaded before and after the switch differ by the unit (1 US dollar per kilogram equals 100 US cents per kilogram) and by a level gap of about 19% over the common period.
• Alternative sources. Weekly auction reports give higher-frequency prices (the World Bank credits African Tea Brokers Limited and the International Tea Committee among its sources). The Pink Sheet’s Colombo, Kolkata and three-auction average columns cover the other main black-tea markets.
• Late auction data. The World Bank sometimes updates tea prices after first release. The notes of its workbook list tea updates for February 2026 (April 2026 edition) and June 2026 (July 2026 edition).

Common Pitfalls When Using This Series

1. Confusing nominal and real prices. This series is nominal. Comparing an early-1990s reading to a recent one without adjusting for cumulative inflation overstates the real change. Deflating by CPI gives the true purchasing-power move.
2. Reading the monthly average as a market price. Headlines quote weekly auction results; this dataset reports their monthly average at Mombasa. The two diverge most during fast-moving rallies.
3. Unit and auction confusion. This series is in US dollars per kilogram, the same unit as the coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton files on Eco3min. It covers Mombasa/Nairobi only: Colombo, Kolkata and the three-auction average trade at different levels. Files downloaded before 30 September 2026 followed a different tea price, with a median level gap of about 19%, so a unit conversion alone does not reconcile them.

Historical Regimes

1992–2008: Range-bound auctions. Tea traded in a range as auction supply from Kenya, India, and Sri Lanka stayed broadly adequate, with annual averages at Mombasa between 1.30 and 2.22 USD/kg. The sharpest spike took the monthly price to 2.81 in February 1998, before it fell back to 1.56 by May.

2009–2017: Firmer demand. Growing consumption within producing countries and periodic East African droughts supported prices. The annual average rose from 2.52 USD/kg in 2009 to 2.97 in 2017, and the monthly price reached its all-time high of 3.39 in July 2015, up from 1.88 in December 2014.

2018–2020: Oversupply pressure. Strong Kenyan crops weighed on Mombasa auction prices, which fell from 2.99 USD/kg in February 2018 to 1.81 in July 2020.

2021–2022: Sri Lanka shock. Sri Lanka’s abrupt 2021 ban on chemical fertiliser slashed yields, and the 2022 economic crisis disrupted exports, tightening global black-tea supply. At Mombasa the price rose from 1.76 USD/kg in July 2021 to 2.73 in February 2022.

2023–2026: Narrow range. From January 2023 to August 2026 the Mombasa price stayed between 1.91 USD/kg (May 2025) and 2.40 (March 2023), below its 2009–2017 levels and without the parabolic moves seen in coffee or cocoa.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

Commodity Price Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min commodity price repository: energy, metals, agricultural softs and grains, most of them from the World Bank Pink Sheet.

Explore the Commodity Price Hub

Sources

• World Bank: Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), Monthly Prices, column “Tea, Mombasa” (CC BY 4.0)
• Mombasa/Nairobi tea auctions (African origin, all tea), the market basis of the Pink Sheet series

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). Tea Price: Global Monthly Price (1992-2026). Source: World Bank, Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), CC BY 4.0.<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/tea-price-history-dataset/