How housing costs are measured in consumer price indexes at Stats NZ – Methods release
3 October 2022
This page explains the way we measure different housing-related costs in the consumer price indexes Stats NZ has.
Housing costs are measured in the consumers price index (CPI) and the household living-costs price indexes (HLPIs). Rent prices specifically are also measured in the rental price indexes (RPIs), as well as in the CPI and HLPIs.
We outline what housing costs we measure, the data sources we use, and why we measure housing prices the way we do for the different indexes. These differences contribute to why the HLPI all-households group sometimes differs from the overall CPI movement.
Summary of differences:
- For the CPI, we measure the cost of building a new house, which is the international best practice when the main purpose of the CPI is to set monetary policy.
- For the HLPIs, we include the cost of mortgage interest payments, which aligns with their use as cost-of-living measures.
- For the RPIs, we use tenancy bond data to measure price change for new private rentals and existing private rentals. This data is combined with other data and used in the calculation of rent in the CPI and HLPIs.
Visit our website to read this methods release: How housing costs are measured in consumer price indexes at Stats NZ
