Nobody can tell you whether blinds got dearer. The index that could was discontinued in 2011.

What the CPI used to publish

The Consumer Price Index is built as a pyramid. Above are eleven groups, below them 33 sub-groups, and at the bottom the expenditure classes. That bottom layer is where the published detail stops, and the ABS is explicit about why: Indexes are only published down to expenditure class as this is the level at which the structure and weights are fixed for the life of a CPI series. Whatever sits inside an expenditure class is priced, but never published on its own.

So the only question that matters for anyone trying to track the price of a blind is whether window coverings have ever had an expenditure class with their name on it. They did. In the 15th series the class numbered 5.1.2 was Floor and window coverings. Carpet and curtains, counted together, published quarterly, in the national inflation figures.

What happened in September 2011

The 16th series CPI rebuilt the classification. The ABS said so in advance: The 16th series CPI includes a number of updates which will be incorporated from the September quarter 2011. The reason for redrawing the commodity classification was international comparability, not anything to do with furnishings: To enable greater international comparability, the classification will be aligned with the United Nations Classification of Individual Consumption according to Purpose (COICOP) where possible. The alignment holds to this day. The current methodology describes the classification as a demand-based classification that broadly aligns with the international standard Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP).

The ABS published a line-by-line correspondence between the 15th and 16th series. Against the old 5.1.2 it reads: Discontinued, split into 5.1.2 (Carpets and other floor coverings) and 5.2.1 (Household textiles). The two halves went to very different places. Floor coverings kept an expenditure class of their own, described on the ABS classification page as New, part 5.1.2 (Floor and window coverings). Window coverings did not. They went into a brand new class built by merging what was left of them with the old towels-and-linen class: New, combination of 5.1.3 (Towels and linen) and part 5.1.2 (Floor and window coverings).

That single decision is the whole story. Curtains and blinds stopped being half of a class named after them and became a minority share of a class named after something else. There is no evidence in any of the ABS documents that this was aimed at window coverings, and no reason to think it was. It is what happens to a small category when a classification is redrawn to match an international standard: it lands wherever the standard puts it.

Where window coverings live now, and how little room there is

Household textiles is both a sub-group and the single expenditure class inside it. On the most recent published weighting pattern it is 0.464 per cent of the CPI basket. Inside that 0.464 per cent sit sheets, pillowcases, towels, tablecloths, face washers and every curtain and fabric blind in the country. The ABS does not publish the split, and the passage above explains why it never will: expenditure class is the floor.

What the surviving class has done, and the care it needs

Read across the bottom three rows and it is tempting to draw a conclusion the data will not support. Carpets and other floor coverings, the half of the old class that kept its identity, is up 3.7 per cent over the year. Household textiles, the half window coverings were folded into, is down 0.6 per cent. That is a real difference between two published series, but it is not evidence about curtains, because the second series is mostly not curtains.

The long run is more striking and needs the same caution. Taking the quarterly series from the September quarter 2011, when the split took effect, to the September quarter 2025, the last quarter before the CPI became a monthly measure: Household textiles moved from 101.4 to 91.6, a fall of 9.7 per cent, while the All groups CPI rose from 99.8 to 143.6, a rise of 43.9 per cent. Deflated by the CPI that is a fall of about 37 per cent in real terms. Of the 57 quarters from the split to September 2025, 55 sat below the September 2011 level. This is one of the few parts of the household budget where the nominal price has gone backwards for fourteen years.

The ABS has offered its own read on why, in passing, while explaining why the weight of these classes keeps shrinking. Setting out the 17th series expenditure weights it recorded falls for Furniture (-0.24pp), Household textiles (-0.12pp) and Major household appliances (-0.09pp), driven by subdued price growth as a result of retail competition and imports. Retail competition and imports is also the story our own industry piece found on the supply side, where a commercial research firm estimates local window-covering manufacturing has been shrinking about 2.4 per cent a year under import pressure. Two different measurements, pointing the same way, which is worth more than either alone.

Why a single month's figure is worthless here

Update, 27 August 2026. The July 2026 CPI, released on 26 August 2026, gives this argument its sharpest illustration yet. Household textiles rose from 92.57 to 103.25 in a single month, a jump of 11.5 per cent, while the All groups CPI moved 1.0 per cent. Nobody should read that as the price of curtains. It is the same June low and July rebound the class has posted in every year the monthly series has covered: 7.7 per cent in 2024, 10.0 per cent in 2025 and 11.5 per cent in 2026, against All groups moves of 0.3, 1.3 and 1.0 per cent over the same three pairs of months. The June trough has deepened each year (93.37, then 93.10, then 92.57) and the July rebound has climbed each year (100.57, then 102.45, then 103.25), so the sale calendar this index is picking up is not merely present, it is widening. Adding July takes the average one-month move across 28 observations to 4.06 per cent, against 0.40 per cent for the All groups CPI. Nothing in the piece below changes, and the point it makes is firmer for the new figure: this series cannot tell you what a blind costs.

Since the CPI became a complete monthly measure the temptation to read each release has grown, and in this corner of the basket it should be resisted. Across the 27 monthly observations from April 2024 to June 2026, the average size of a one-month move in Household textiles was 3.78 per cent, against 0.38 per cent for the All groups CPI. The class ranged from 92.15 to 105.51 over those 27 months, a spread of 14.5 per cent, with no trend to speak of inside it. Carpets and other floor coverings, by contrast, averaged 0.58 per cent a month.

A category that swings four per cent a month is a category on sale, then off it. Household textiles is discounted heavily and often, and the monthly index is picking up the sale calendar rather than any underlying price. Anyone telling you household textiles fell 4.7 per cent in the year to May, as the published series did, is quoting noise. The June reading of minus 0.6 per cent is the same noise pointing a different way.

The other three doors, all of them tried

If the CPI cannot see window coverings, something else might. We checked, and the honest answer is no.

• Import data. The obvious route: almost all blinds sold here are imported or made from imported components, and customs classifications are far more detailed than the CPI. The ABS free data service publishes merchandise imports by SITC, and its published code list stops at the three-digit level: 349 codes for everything Australia imports. The closest one to a curtain is 658, Made-up articles, wholly or chiefly of textile materials, nes, and it stops one level above the detail that would name them. A plastic or aluminium venetian is not even in that code, because it is not a textile. The broader International Trade in Goods series is coarser still, with 54 published items covering all of Australia's trade. Neither list contains the word blind, curtain or awning.
• Spending, not price. The ABS Monthly Household Spending Indicator has a furnishings and household equipment category, and we use it, but it measures what households spend, not what things cost. Spending rises when prices rise and also when people simply buy more.
• The industry's own numbers. IBISWorld estimates the size of the local manufacturing industry, which is a supply-side commercial estimate rather than a price, and sits behind a paywall. The industry body's own energy rating scheme for coverings, WincovER, has published nothing since April 2021 and its product search returns a 404, so there is no quality signal to pair with a price either.

What a buyer should take from this

Two practical things, and one is a judgement we will own as ours.

The practical one first. There is no published benchmark for what a blind should cost, there is no official series you can cite back at a quote, and there will not be one, because the level at which such a thing would be published was fixed in 2011 and window coverings are not on it. The only comparison available to a buyer is the one they assemble themselves, from quotes, in writing, for the same specification. That is not a counsel of despair. It is the reason a like-for-like written quote is worth more in this trade than in most.

The judgement. When a supplier explains a price rise by saying everything has gone up, the nearest public series does not support the general form of that claim. The class containing curtains and fabric blinds has fallen 9.7 per cent in nominal terms since 2011 and roughly 37 per cent in real terms, at a time when the CPI rose 43.9 per cent, and the ABS attributes that softness to retail competition and imports. That is an argument about the category, not about any individual business, and a specific product genuinely can move against its category: an aluminium shutter, a motor, a freight cost or a currency can each go the other way. But the burden of explaining that sits with whoever is asking for the money, and a buyer is entitled to ask what specifically went up.

The last thing worth saying is about the gap itself. We are not going to argue that the ABS should reinstate an expenditure class for a slice of the basket smaller than half a per cent; the case for that is weak and the ABS's reasoning is published and coherent. What is missing is smaller and cheaper. The most recent published statement of what "Household textiles" actually contains is the 2011 correspondence table used in this story. There is no current, plain list of the products in each expenditure class on the ABS site. Publishing one would cost almost nothing and would let anyone check, rather than reconstruct, which of the things they buy the national inflation figure is watching.