Headline inflation has eased. So why does the weekly shop, the rent and the power bill still feel relentless? Because the crisis was never really about the average price of everything — it is about the prices households cannot avoid.
Inflation is usually told through a single number. But a slowing inflation rate does not mean prices are falling; it means they are still rising, only a little less quickly than before. The pressure people actually feel comes from a narrower basket — housing, food, transport, energy and insurance — and from whether wages are keeping up. These five charts follow that pressure, using open data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
The headline Consumer Price Index has drifted down toward more normal territory. Underneath it, though, the categories households can least avoid are still climbing faster than the average. Housing and transport in particular sit well above the all-groups line.
Multivariate: time × category × annual change. Drag the slider below the chart to focus on a period; click a legend item to mute a line. Source: ABS Consumer Price Index, Australia.
A price rise only becomes a squeeze when pay does not keep up. Comparing wage growth with the living costs faced by working households shows how long the gap has run: for most of the past few years, the cost of living for employee households grew faster than wages, quietly eroding household budgets. The shaded band is that gap.
Multivariate: time × two series × the gap between them. Source: ABS Wage Price Index and Selected Living Cost Indexes, Australia.
Breaking each household’s costs into essentials shows where the pain concentrates. Housing is the standout across every group, while the more discretionary categories barely move. Hover any cell to read the exact figure.
Multivariate: household type × category × annual change. Source: ABS Selected Living Cost Indexes, Australia.
Zooming into the individual things people buy makes the story plain. Energy, fuel and council rates have run far ahead of the headline rate, while a few items have eased. The cost-of-living crisis is, at heart, a crisis of essentials.
Source: ABS Consumer Price Index, Australia (expenditure classes).
Put together, the five charts tell one story. Headline inflation has cooled, but the essentials — housing above all, then energy, fuel and transport — keep rising faster than the average. Wages have spent years trailing the cost of living for working households. And the households with the least room to adjust, those on pensions and benefits, carry the heaviest load.
That is why the crisis feels worse than the headline number suggests. When the squeeze lands on the things people cannot give up, an “easing” inflation rate offers little relief at the checkout.
I used a generative AI assistant (ChatGPT, OpenAI) to help brainstorm the story angle, refine wording, and sanity-check my approach against the assignment brief. I reviewed,edited, and adapted the output myself. All data selection, the analytical decisions, the final code, the chart designs, and the interpretation are my own, and I have verified every figure against the source ABS releases.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026, May 27). Consumer Price Index, Australia, April 2026 https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026, May 5). Selected Living Cost Indexes, Australia, March 2026 https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026, May 13). Wage Price Index, Australia, March 2026https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/wage-price-index-australia/latest-release
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (June 2026 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com