Household Consumption Expenditure Survey

HCES records household consumption of food, fuel, clothing, housing, education, health, transport and other goods and services in both quantity and value terms. It is the main official source for monthly per-capita consumption expenditure and supports work on living standards, poverty, inequality, consumption baskets and the weights used in consumer-price indices.

The 2022–23 and 2023–24 rounds followed a long gap and introduced design and questionnaire changes, so they are not automatically comparable with older NSS consumer-expenditure rounds. Unit-level files are split into multiple record levels and require careful merging with the documentation, weights and survey design; a simple row average will not reproduce the published estimates.