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 United Kingdom desk leads with Bank Rate, the Bank of England's policy rate, then SONIA, the sterling overnight market benchmark the Bank publishes but does not set. Euro-area, US, Canadian and Australian rates follow, with the rest of the build's series after them. All desks republish the same official series; this desk only reorders the menu and the wording, so the figures do not change when you switch desks.

Both UK series come from Bank of England statistical tables and are republished under the Bank's open-data terms, with attribution. Bank Rate is a policy setting that moves at MPC decisions; SONIA is a transaction-based market rate that moves daily. The build does not publish a UK retail mortgage or savings rate, because no such official series is ingested here — those pages are absent rather than estimated. This is not financial advice.