The Australian Bureau of Statistics will shift its monthly Consumer Price Index release to the fourth Wednesday of each month starting February 2027, after concluding the earlier timing would not compromise data quality S¹ — an assessment that is the bureau's own and has not been independently verified.
The ABS has also chosen not to refresh the spending weights that shape the CPI until January 2027. The inflation gauge the RBA watches through the rest of this year is therefore built on older household spending patterns.
My read: This is a quiet but real shift. Moving the release forward by a few days sounds administrative, but in a cycle where every data point feeds rate decisions, earlier inflation prints give the RBA and mortgage markets less time to guess between collection and publication. I'm more sceptical of the weight-update skip. The ABS says spending patterns haven't shifted enough to warrant a mid-2026 refresh, but with construction costs and rents climbing, housing's share of household budgets may be moving faster than the weights capture. The real test comes in February 2027, when both the new schedule and the updated weights arrive together.
Weights and schedule both shift on 24 February 2027
The CPI weights — the proportions used to calculate the index based on how much households spend on each category, will be updated for January 2027 data. The release is scheduled for 24 February 2027 S¹. On the same date, the publication schedule shifts from the final Wednesday of each month to the fourth Wednesday S¹.
The ABS reviewed the timing change and concluded that releasing earlier would not harm CPI quality or fall short of what users need S¹ — though this is the bureau's own finding, with no external validation published. Quarterly CPI figures, which the ABS publishes as a trimmed mean series that strips out volatile price swings to reveal the underlying trend S¹, sit in tables 17 and 18 of the data downloads. The bureau adds the latest quarter's data to those tables when the monthly CPI is published for March, June, September and December [S1, P2, P3].
Stale weights may understate rent-driven inflation
Earlier in 2026, the ABS postponed its scheduled weight update. The bureau monitored spending data and decided an update was not needed because household spending patterns had not changed enough S¹ — this determination is the ABS's own, based on internal monitoring with no released methodology or error bars.
Weight updates determine how much influence each spending category has on the headline inflation number. If rents take a larger slice of household budgets but the weights still reflect an earlier period, the CPI may understate the price pressure people actually feel. The RBA's own inflation measures page, last updated 26 August 2026 P⁶, relies on ABS data to track price movements across the economy.
For mortgage brokers advising clients on fixed-rate rollovers, the weight gap means the CPI the RBA watches through the rest of 2026 reflects spending patterns that predate the current rent and construction-cost cycle. The next weight refresh arrives with the January 2027 CPI, scheduled for release on 24 February 2027 S¹, the same day the new publication schedule takes effect.
Sources: S1 — ABS Consumer Price Index (quarterly inflation) — 2026-Q2 release · P2 — Consumer Price Index, Australia, December 2025 | Australian Bureau of · P3 — Consumer Price Index, Australia, December 2025 · P4 — Consumer Price Index, Australia, June 2026 | Australian Bureau of Stat · P5 — Consumer Price Index, Australia, May 2026 | Australian Bureau of Stati · P6 — Measures of Consumer Price Inflation | RBA · P7 — Lending indicators, June Quarter 2026 | Australian Bureau of Statistic
Written from 7 sourced items, 7 of them primary.
