The surging prices have hit household earnings and hurt President Tayyip Erdogan's popularity, making the May elections his biggest ever political challenge.
The lira weakened slightly to 19.2020
against the dollar after the data, from 19.9600 beforehand. It
has touched a series of intraday record lows in recent days.
March consumer prices rose 2.29% from a month earlier , less than a predicted 2.85% in a Reuters poll.
Consumer price rises in March were led by the restaurant and hotel sector which surged 70.7% year-on-year, closely followed by a 67.9% rise in key food and non-alcoholic drinks prices.
Turkey's southeast region was hit almost two months ago by massive earthquakes which killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and left millions homeless. The earthquake is expected to cost Turkey more than $100 billion and shave one to two percentage points off growth this year.
Last month, Turkey's central bank kept its policy rate steady after easing to 8.5% to support growth and employment in the wake of the disaster.
Erdogan has urged monetary stimulus in recent years, aiming to achieve price stability by slashing borrowing costs, boosting exports and turning current account deficits to surpluses.
The poll had forecast that consumer prices would be up 51.3% from a year earlier, and were expected to end
the year at 46.5%.
The domestic producer price index was up 0.44%
month-on-month in March for an annual rise of 62.45%, according
to the data from the Turkish Statistical Institute.
(Reporting by Canan Sevgili and Azra Ceylan;
Writing by Daren Butler;
Editing by Jonathan Spicer)
