ABS

Australian Bureau of Statistics API

The ABS publishes Australia's official statistics: CPI, GDP, unemployment, wages, retail trade, building approvals, migration, population, and the five-yearly Census.

Use it for macro dashboards, cost-of-living charts, housing-pipeline models, labour-market analysis, and any product that needs verifiable Australian economic numbers.

Why use ausdata.io. The ABS Data API speaks SDMX 2.1. You learn dimension codes and the catalogue tree before you get a single value. We wrap the headline series as plain JSON with named fields.

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Datasets we serve from ABS

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is the country official statistical agency. It publishes hundreds of statistical releases covering inflation, employment, wages, population, trade, housing, and the census. Most of this data is technically free to access via the ABS SDMX endpoint --- but SDMX is an XML-based standard designed for inter-agency exchange, not for developers building products.

ausdata.io provides a clean REST + MCP layer over ABS data. Same data, same licensing (CC-BY 4.0), without the SDMX learning curve.

What's covered

ausdata.io curates 80+ ABS datasets across:

Prices and inflation

CPI (quarterly, all-groups + 12 expenditure groups + trimmed mean + weighted median)
CPI_MONTHLY (monthly indicator, 12 categories, 8 capital cities)
WPI (Wage Price Index, quarterly)

Labour market

LF (Labour Force, monthly, by region and measure)
LF_AGE (by age band)
AWE (Average Weekly Earnings, biannual)

National accounts

ANA_AGG (national accounts aggregates, quarterly GDP and components)
GDP_E (expenditure-side GDP)

Housing

BUILDING_APPROVALS (monthly, by region and building type)
BUILDING_ACTIVITY (quarterly, includes completions)
RES_DWELL_ST (residential dwelling prices, mean and median)

Population and migration

NOM (net overseas migration, quarterly)
ABS_NOM_VISA_CY (NOM by visa category)
ABS_ANNUAL_ERP_ASGS2021 (estimated resident population by geographic area)

Trade

ITGS (International Trade in Goods and Services, monthly)

Retail and spending

RT (Retail Turnover, monthly)
HSI_M (Household Spending Indicator, monthly)

Census 2021

C21_G01_POA (Census G01 by postcode)
C21_G02_POA (Census G02 by postcode)
C21_G02_SA2 (Census G02 by SA2)

Each dataset has its own filter dimensions documented at /v1/describe/abs/{dataset_id}. See the complete list at /v1/datasets/abs.

Sample queries

Current inflation rate

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/abs/CPI?region=australia&category=all_groups&measure=change_year&limit=1"

Unemployment rate, by state, monthly

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/abs/LF?region=nsw&measure=unemployment_rate&sex=persons"

Building approvals, latest 12 months

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/abs/BUILDING_APPROVALS?region=australia&building_type=total_dwellings&limit=12"

Why use ausdata.io vs direct SDMX

Three concrete differences:

One auth header, one envelope. Every ABS dataset (and every dataset across the other 8 sources) uses the same Authorization: Bearer ak_... header and the same JSON response shape. SDMX requires separate parsing logic per dataflow.
Plain-English filters. Where SDMX uses dimension codes like MEASURE.M1 and REGION.AUS, ausdata.io accepts measure=change_year and region=australia. The mapping is documented at /v1/describe/abs/{dataset_id}.
Cross-source composers. Endpoints like /v1/real-rate-regime (RBA cash rate + ABS CPI) and /v1/credit-impulse (RBA D2 + ABS GDP) are pre-computed joins you cannot get from SDMX directly.

Licensing

ABS data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You can use it in commercial products, articles, and applications. The licence requires attribution. Every ausdata.io response includes the full attribution string in meta.sources[].attribution:

Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data, licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Copy this verbatim into your output. The licence is permissive but the attribution is mandatory.

Update frequency

Different ABS datasets refresh at different cadences:

CPI (quarterly): released ~25 days after quarter end
CPI_MONTHLY: released ~30 days after month end
LF (Labour Force): released ~25 days after month end (~third Thursday)
WPI: released ~7 weeks after quarter end
GDP: released ~9 weeks after quarter end
Building approvals: released ~5 weeks after month end

Our caches refresh hourly. You see new data within ~1 hour of ABS publication.

To get notified the moment new data publishes, subscribe to webhooks for the specific dataset you care about.

Composers that use ABS

The following composers are powered partially or entirely by ABS data:

/v1/economic-dashboard (CPI, LF, WPI, HSI_M)
/v1/real-wages (WPI − CPI)
/v1/real-rate-regime (RBA F1 − ABS CPI)
/v1/cost-of-living (CPI by 12 expenditure groups)
/v1/cpi-by-city (CPI by 8 capital cities)
/v1/inflation-decomposition (CPI by category × basket weight)
/v1/approvals-vs-completions (BUILDING_APPROVALS + BUILDING_ACTIVITY)
/v1/approvals-vs-migration (BUILDING_APPROVALS + NOM)
/v1/housing-affordability (RES_DWELL_ST + ATO income)
/v1/trade-balance (ITGS)
/v1/youth-unemployment (LF_AGE)
/v1/macro-snapshot-state (LF, WPI by state)

If your use case is covered by one of these composers, it is usually faster to call the composer than to fetch the raw ABS series and compute the join yourself.

Get a free API key → /register

Sample queries

bash

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/cost-of-living"

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/abs/LABOUR_FORCE?region=AUS&limit=12"

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/abs/WPI?sector=Private&limit=8"

Composers that use ABS

Licence

CC-BY 4.0. Attribution returned on every response.

Query ABS data in one curl

500 free calls per month. No credit card.

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