Australia’s Commodity Price Index Rises 1.2% in August, Up 15.5% From a Year Earlier

Australia’s commodity export price gauge rose in August and remained sharply higher than a year earlier, according to Reserve Bank of Australia data released Tuesday. The RBA’s preliminary estimate showed its Index of Commodity Prices increasing 1.2% on a monthly-average basis in Special Drawing Right terms, leaving the index 15.5% above its August 2025 level.

The rise was much smaller when measured in Australian dollars. The Australian-dollar index gained 0.1% in August and was 5.8% higher over the year. The latest release also revised the direction of July’s move: the RBA now says the index fell 0.5% in July, compared with the preliminary 0.6% increase reported a month ago.

Non-rural and base metals lift the August reading

The RBA said the non-rural and base metals subindices increased during August, while the rural subindex declined. Its September 1 commodity-price release described the annual increase as broadly based across most commodities, with iron ore and alumina the exceptions. The central bank did not identify individual commodities as the main drivers of the monthly rise, so the subindex movements provide a firmer guide to August than attributing the gain to any single raw material.

Currency denomination matters when reading the figures. The RBA publishes commodity-price measures in several currency terms, and has long used the SDR series as a way to reduce the influence of movements in any one major currency on the underlying commodity-price signal. By contrast, the Australian-dollar measure reflects both changes in world commodity prices and changes in the exchange rate. That helps explain why the 1.2% SDR increase in August translated into only a 0.1% rise in Australian-dollar terms, without implying that Australian exporters received the same price movement in every commodity.

A second RBA measure that substitutes spot prices for bulk commodities pointed in the same direction but was slightly softer. On that basis, the overall index rose 1.0% in August in SDR terms and was 14.7% higher than a year earlier. The Bank also cautioned that its most recent export-price estimates for iron ore, coking coal, thermal coal and liquefied natural gas are preliminary and based on market information, which means later releases can revise the recent history.

The July revision shows why that qualification matters. When the July index was first published on August 4, the RBA estimated a 0.6% monthly increase in SDR terms. The August release now puts July at a 0.5% decline, a 1.1 percentage point swing from the preliminary estimate and a change in the sign of the monthly movement. August’s 1.2% rise therefore follows a contraction rather than the modest gain initially reported for July.

Bulk commodities still dominate the basket

The composition of the index gives large resource prices an outsized role in the aggregate reading. Under weights that took effect in April 2026, bulk commodities account for 50.8% of the basket and other resources for another 34.5%. Rural commodities carry an 11.1% weight and base metals 3.6%.

Iron ore alone represents 30.9% of the current index, making it the largest individual component. LNG has a 16.3% weight, metallurgical coal 11.4%, gold 9.8% and thermal coal 8.5%. Those figures put the RBA’s annual breakdown into context: the 15.5% increase was achieved even though iron ore and alumina were exceptions to the broadly based rise across most commodity prices.

The RBA updates the weights to keep the basket aligned with Australia’s export mix. The April 2026 reweighting uses average export values from the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years and rebases the index so the 2024/25 average equals 100. Among the larger changes, gold’s weight increased by 3.4 percentage points and iron ore’s by 2.1 points, while thermal coal’s weight fell 2.9 points and lithium’s dropped 1.6 points. Nickel was also returned to the basket with a 0.1% weight after having been excluded since March 2023.

That construction is important for interpreting the headline percentage. The RBA describes the ICP as a Laspeyres index, meaning it is a weighted measure of commodity-price changes using a fixed base-period export mix. It is intended as a timely indicator of prices received by Australian commodity exporters, not a direct measure of export volumes, mining output or total export revenue. A 15.5% annual rise in the index therefore does not mean Australia’s commodity export receipts rose by the same percentage.

Commodity prices remain important to Australia’s trade income

Separate official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed export prices were already moving higher in the June quarter, although that series is quarterly, measured in Australian dollars and constructed differently from the RBA’s monthly commodity index. The ABS Export Price Index rose 1.1% in the June quarter and 3.9% from a year earlier. Coal, coke and briquettes rose 5.4% over the quarter, while petroleum and related products increased 22.7%; those gains were partly offset by an 8.8% fall in non-monetary gold and a 1.4% decline in metalliferous ores and metal scrap.

The two releases should not be treated as interchangeable, but together they show why the direction of export prices matters for Australia. The RBA notes that commodities make up a large share of Australian exports, so shifts in commodity prices feed into the terms of trade and can affect the domestic-currency prices received by exporters. Over time, higher export prices can support export income, although the eventual effect also depends on export volumes, the exchange rate and the particular mix of commodities being sold.

August’s split between the SDR and Australian-dollar measures is a reminder that exchange-rate translation can materially alter the domestic-currency picture. The 15.5% annual increase in SDR terms compares with a 5.8% rise in Australian-dollar terms. For readers tracking conditions in resource industries, the Australian-dollar measure is therefore relevant alongside the broader SDR signal, while company-level results will not move one-for-one with an aggregate commodity-price index.

The RBA’s next scheduled Index of Commodity Prices release is due October 1 at 4:30 p.m. AEST. That release will provide the first estimate for September and may revise recent monthly readings as more information on export prices becomes available.