Australia cash rate target

Source: RBA Statistical Tables F1 / F1.1, series FIRMMCRTD and FIRMMCRT. Licence: RBA disclaimer: data may be used with attribution; not for unauthorised commercial redistribution of raw tables (terms). Files: data/raw/rba-f01d.xlsx + data/raw/rba-f01hist.xlsx.

Reading this series

The Australian cash rate target is set by the Reserve Bank of Australia's board and is the overnight interest rate the RBA targets in the money market. The headline uses the latest daily target from RBA table F1, series FIRMMCRTD; the long chart and history use the monthly average series FIRMMCRT from F1.1, which reaches back to 1990. The distinction matters: the daily target is the current policy setting, while the monthly averages are the historical record used for the summary statistics.

The chart is stepped because the target changes only at board decisions. Read the headline, then the "versus the previous reading" line, which the page replaces with the date of the last actual move when the target has been unchanged. Mean, median, low and high are arithmetic summaries of the observations shown, so a long period at one setting pulls them toward it. Chart and Table show the same series two ways, the range buttons filter the window without recalculating, and Explore adds zoom and pan on request.

About this desk

The Australia desk leads with the RBA's cash rate target, then New Zealand's OCR and the US federal funds rate, with the rest of the build's series after them. The cash rate is the RBA board's policy target for the overnight money market, published in the F1 daily and F1.1 monthly tables; the page uses the daily target for the headline and the monthly history for the long chart. Because it changes only at board meetings, the series is drawn as steps.

All desks show the same official series, reordered toward one economy; the figures do not change with the desk. Values are republished from official files without alteration. The build publishes no Australian mortgage or deposit rate, because no official series for those is ingested — the desk omits them rather than estimating. This is not financial advice, and readings may lag their source.