Retail Trade Replacement Program – Monthly Household Spending Indicator

Enhancements to the Monthly Household Spending Indicator (MHSI) have enabled the ABS to stop the Retail Trade publication on 31 July 2025, providing users with a more comprehensive view on household consumption and eliminating the need for businesses to respond to the Retail Business Survey. Further details including the timeline of changes and frequently asked questions is available in Cessation of the Retail Business Survey and Retail Trade Publication.

As of August 2025, the enhanced MHSI publication includes the following series with data going back to January 2019:

• Dollar levels per consumption category per State and territory per month, using the same 9 COICOP categories as the original MHSI.
• Monthly seasonally adjusted series for the nine currently published COICOP categories, by State and territory .
• Quarterly seasonally adjusted chain volume measures for the nine currently published COICOP categories, and for each State and territory.
• Publication of a second set of outputs classified by industry rather than product.

During the next few months, we also aim to produce: 

• Modelled back series for all product-level outputs, going back to approximately 2013.

Based on feedback from key users, we have made adjustments to the bank transaction data, to move the target concept from “spending” to “consumption”. This should lead to better alignment between MHSI outputs and quarterly HFCE. The adjustments are of three main types.

1. Product split. When you pay for something using a card, the transaction is assigned to a Merchant Category Code (MCC). Prior to the June 2024 MHSI publication, each MCC simply contributed to the best matching category of consumption (COICOP). For example, money spent at a department store is all counted as “clothing and footwear” regardless of the actual items purchased.
   
   In the enhanced MHSI (June 2024 publication onwards), many of the MCCs are pro-rated so that they contribute to multiple COICOPs. For example, department store expenditure might be counted as approximately 45% clothing and footwear, 30% recreation and culture, 20% furnishings and household equipment, and so on. The proportions are mostly taken from the 2012-13 Retail and Wholesale Industries survey. Over the next few years, we aim to bring in newer data to update the product splits.
    
2. Scope and coverage adjustments. The data received by ABS comes from a number of banks, but does not cover every card transaction in Australia, and does not include cash or other payment channels. Over time, we expect to see a mix of growth from genuine increases in consumption plus growth from greater use of cards in preference to cash. There may also be movements due to changes in the coverage of our participating banks compared with other institutions.
   
   The enhanced MHSI uses data from the Reserve Bank’s Monthly Payment Statistics and Consumer Payment Survey to adjust the raw bank data for scope and coverage. This means that MHSI should be responsive to changes like increased or decreased cash use.
    
3. Inclusion of supplementary data sources. The enhanced MHSI uses supermarket scanner data (the same data that is currently used in CPI and HFCE) to improve the accuracy of our estimates for food consumption expenditure and VFACTS and Electric Vehicle Council data on purchases of new vehicles to improve transport estimates.
    

As well as these changes, we have reassessed the role of benchmarking with annual benchmarking used for the enhanced MHSI.

In March 2025 the ABS released an information paper, which provides guidance on using MHSI data: Interpreting the Monthly Household Spending Indicator. 

The following changes are viewed by the ABS as desirable, but have not yet been ranked in priority order or allocated to a forward work program. We are interested in feedback on the relative value of each item for users, and any other suggestions for long term improvements to MHSI.

• Further improvements to product splits by bringing in newer data.
• Finer geographic breakdown by capital city and rest of state.
• Separate series for online (card not present) and card present transactions.
• A separate series for overseas expenditure by Australian residents.
• Monthly chain volume measures.
• Expand MHSI to include the other three COICOP categories (Education; Communication; Housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels).
• Outputs classified by finer industry categories – for example, splitting Food retailing into Supermarkets, Other specialised food and Liquor retailing. 

Due to the confidential nature of the source data, the ABS does not intend to publish estimates at very fine levels of geography or to provide users with customized extracts or microdata access. We are grateful to participating banks for their willingness to share their valuable data assets and for their collaboration on continuous improvements to the data supply.

If you have a question about the cessation of the Retail Business Survey, or if you are interested in being part of the conversation about the enhancements to the Monthly Household Spending Indicator, Monthly Business Turnover Indicator or Household Final Consumption Expenditure, please email household.spending@abs.gov.au. To submit anonymous feedback please click the green Feedback button on the right hand side of this page.