Household Spending YoY

Household Spending YoY is the yearly change in Australia's Monthly Household Spending Indicator (MHSI). YoY compares a month with the same month 12 months earlier.

Published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), it estimates household purchases of goods and services. It uses bank card transactions, supermarket scanner data and new vehicle sales, not a household survey. It covers 9 of 13 COICOP consumption divisions for Australia and each state and territory. That is about 68% of HFCE household consumption, against 30% for the old Retail Trade survey.

Monthly releases land about 4 to 6 weeks after the calendar reference month, at 11:30am Sydney and Canberra time. Each release shows dollar levels with MoM and YoY change for total spending, each of the 9 divisions and the analytical splits.

It also splits goods versus services and discretionary versus non-discretionary spending. Quarterly real volumes arrive in the March, June, September and December issues, with data tables and a media release. Past values are revised as sources arrive, methods improve, yearly HFCE benchmarks arrive, seasonal factors update and new base years apply.

Yearly change reflects the 9 published divisions below, across goods and services and discretionary and non-discretionary use.

• Food, Alcoholic beverages and tobacco: grocery food as non-discretionary goods, with alcohol and tobacco as discretionary goods.
• Clothing and footwear, Furnishings and household equipment: clothing, footwear, furniture and home goods, all discretionary.
• Health: medicines and medical aids as non-discretionary goods, with health services as non-discretionary services.
• Transport: vehicle purchases as discretionary goods from Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) VFACTS and Electric Vehicle Council (EVC) sales data. Operation, repair and road transport as non-discretionary, with air and sea travel as discretionary.
• Recreation and culture, Hotels, cafes and restaurants: leisure goods and services plus hotel, cafe and restaurant services, all discretionary.
• Miscellaneous goods and services: personal care, perfumes, personal effects and other services, all discretionary except insurance and financial services.

In the September 2024 example, released November 1, 2024, seasonally adjusted spending was 69,930.4 million dollars, down 0.1% MoM and up 1.3% YoY. Food rose 0.5%, health 0.6%, furnishings 0.4% and hotels 0.3%, while clothing fell 1.8%. Transport fell 0.6%, recreation 0.4% and alcohol with tobacco 0.3%, and miscellaneous held at 0.0%.

In real inflation-adjusted terms, quarterly spending fell 0.4% YoY, so prices drove the nominal gain, not volumes. Goods fell 0.4% MoM and 0.7% YoY, so services offset goods weakness and left the total almost flat.

1. Collect: Gather credit and debit card transactions by state, plus weekly supermarket scanner sales and monthly new vehicle sales.
2. Classify: Map card spending to COICOP divisions using 2012/13 industry to product shares, while scanner ratios split supermarket spending into food and tobacco.
3. Cash adjustment: Uplift card spending for missing cash with Reserve Bank ATM and payment habit data, smoothed by a 13-term Henderson filter. For example, 10,000 times 1.08 gives 10,800.
4. Benchmark: Scale yearly totals to HFCE consumption through 2023/24 to fix missing banks and bias, which revises past growth.
5. Seasonal adjustment and YoY: Remove seasonal, trading-day and month-length effects. Then compute YoY as 100 times change since the same month 12 months earlier divided by that base. For example, 10,491.4 versus 10,000 a year earlier gives 4.9%.
6. Real volumes: Divide nominal spending by CPI deflators weighted with input-output tables, then chain-link yearly with overlapping quarterly links on a 2023-24 reference year. Real components do not sum to the real total.
7. Rounding: Publish dollars in millions to 1 decimal, with rates from unrounded data then rounded to 1 decimal.