Household Spending MoM

First published in February 2022, the Monthly Household Spending Indicator (MHSI) is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) monthly indicator. It is a derived indicator, not a survey. It is built from bank card transactions, supermarket scanner data and new vehicle sales, with no published counts of banks or chains.

It estimates final consumption by Australian households across 9 of 13 COICOP spending divisions, for Australia and its states and territories. The concept stays close to Household Final Consumption Expenditure (HFCE) and covers about 68% of that total.

Monthly results appear in current prices in original, seasonally adjusted and trend form; quarterly chain-volume results appear in original and seasonally adjusted form. The back-cast current-price series extend to 2012.

Participating banks send transactions data soon after each calendar month ends. Supermarkets send weekly files and vehicle sales arrive monthly, then validation begins.

The ABS publishes it online at 11:30am Sydney time, about 5 to 6 weeks after the reference month. Each release shows the current-price total with month-on-month and through-year percentage changes. It gives the 9 division and state and territory breakdowns. It also gives goods, services, discretionary and non-discretionary splits, quarterly chain-volume results and downloadable tables and charts.

Estimates are revised for source-data updates, processing and method improvements, annual benchmarking, seasonal adjustment and base-year changes. Cash factors are smoothed with a 13-term Henderson filter to limit revisions.

Moves reflect spending across the 9 divisions and two splits: goods versus services and discretionary versus non-discretionary.

• Food, Alcoholic beverages and tobacco: captures supermarket food plus legal alcohol and tobacco.
• Clothing and footwear, Furnishings and household equipment: captures apparel, footwear, furniture and household goods.
• Health: captures out-of-pocket medicines, therapeutic appliances and health services.
• Transport: captures vehicle purchases, motoring and repair spending plus road, rail, air and sea transport.
• Recreation and culture, Hotels, cafes and restaurants: captures leisure goods, cultural services, dining and accommodation.
• Miscellaneous goods and services: captures personal care, personal effects and other services, excluding insurance and financial services.

In the old December 2023 reference month, published 9 February 2024, headline spending rose 2.3% through the year in calendar-adjusted current prices. Services rose 6.6% on transport and health, while goods fell 1.4% on leisure goods and furnishings. Non-discretionary spending rose 5.4% and discretionary spending fell 0.6%, so services carried the headline. These old rates cannot be compared with seasonally adjusted month-on-month moves: the calendar-adjusted series ended in December 2024.

1. Collect and validate: grouped bank card transactions, weekly supermarket item sales and vehicle sales are assembled, standardised and checked once all files arrive.
2. Map to categories: each bank's merchant or industry codes map to COICOP divisions through a concordance. Retail industry sales are split into products with a matrix from the 2012/13 retail and wholesale survey. Supermarket spending maps to food and tobacco; vehicle sales need no mapping.
3. Adjust for coverage: monthly cash factors from ATM statistics and payment surveys correct cash undercoverage, while intermediate and non-resident effects are assumed immaterial.
4. Benchmark: levels are forced to annual state HFCE totals while keeping monthly moves, and each new benchmark revises growth rates.
5. Remove inflation and link: CPI price indexes weighted by Input-Output expenditure form the deflators. Quarterly chain-volume indexes use annual reweighting with one-quarter overlap and do not add up except near the base year.
6. Adjust seasons and trend: seasonal adjustment removes seasonal, trading-day and month-length effects; quarterly current-price totals sum the adjusted values and quarterly volume is adjusted separately.
7. Round and publish: dollar levels go to millions with one decimal and percentage changes are computed on unrounded dollars, then rounded to one decimal. Month-on-month change equals 100 times the monthly move over the prior month, with through-year and quarterly changes built the same way.