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 Japan desk leads with the BIS central bank policy rate series for Japan, compiled by the BIS with the Bank of Japan, then US, Korea and ECB rates. The BIS series follows whichever instrument the authorities treat as the policy rate in each period — today the uncollateralised overnight call rate — and is shown as daily steps from 1946. It is a compiled policy measure, not a mortgage or deposit rate.

All desks show the same official series in a different order; the figures do not change when you switch. Values are republished with attribution to the BIS, and this site is not an official BIS publication. The build ingests no Japanese retail lending series, so those pages are absent rather than estimated. Nothing here is financial advice, and readings may lag their source.