Price Index Methods - Updates For June 2025 Quarter

This page summarises methodological updates for Stats NZ's price indexes for the June 2025 quarter.

Consumers price index

We will publish Consumers price index: June 2025 quarter (CPI) on 21 July 2025.

General methodology

Consumers price index - DataInfo+ describes the methodology used to produce CPI statistics and related metadata.

Corrections to the transport group - March 2025 quarter

We identified two errors in the transport group in the Consumers price index: March 2025 quarter. These will be corrected through catch-up movements in the June 2025 quarter CPI release, bringing the impacted series to their correct levels.

The corrections are:

1. Vehicle relicensing fees:
An increase of $25 in vehicle relicensing fees on 1 January 2025 was not captured. If it had been included, CPI all groups inflation would have been 0.1 percentage points higher in the March 2025 quarter.

2. Domestic airfares weighting:
Route-level weights for domestic airfares were not updated in the March 2025 quarter. While this did not affect the CPI all groups inflation, the impacted series within the transport group incorporates catch-up movements to the correct level.

New data sources and improvements

Additional administrative data for cigarettes and tobacco prices will be incorporated in the CPI and SPI from the July 2025 month, this administrative data replaces the last remaining field collected prices for cigarettes and tobacco.

Monthly CPI

More frequent inflation data is important for policy, forecasting, and informing decisions that help address cost-of-living pressures and drive economic growth.

New funding of $16.5 million over four years will enable Stats NZ to deliver a monthly CPI from the beginning of 2027.

To ensure Stats NZ successfully delivers a monthly CPI, we are updating our prices technology platform and increasing capacity of the project team.

We aim to provide updates on this project as part of these methods paper updates.

Enquiries

James Griffin
04 931 4600
[email protected]

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