Households in the Republic spent an average of €63.11 a week on home heating and electricity between 2022 and 2023, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Thursday. That figure is up almost two-thirds since 2015-2016 as energy prices spiked in the period after the invasion of Ukraine.
Lower income households spent a larger proportion of their income on essentials, such as energy, than their higher income counterparts over the period, according to the agency’s latest household budget survey. Information gleaned from the study, conducted in 2022 and 2023, fed into changes the CSO made to the basket of goods it uses to benchmark changes in consumer price inflation earlier this year.
The survey reveals that the average weekly spend on home energy – including electricity for lighting as well as gas, oil and other fuels for heating and cooking – accounted for 6 per cent of the total expenditure per household, up from 4 per cent when the last survey was conducted between 2015 and 2016.
For households in the lowest income bracket, the cost of essentials – food, housing and energy – accounted for more than half their weekly expenditure compared with 35.5 per cent for the highest income households, the CSO said.
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Overall, the weekly expenditure of an average household in 2022 and 2023 was slightly over €1,007, up from €837.47 in the last survey, an increase of more than 20 per cent. Expenditure on food increased by 30.5 per cent over the period to €160.93 per week, accounting for 16 per cent of the average household’s income, up from 14.7 per cent.
Paul Walsh, a spokesman for Peopl Insurance, said the survey highlighted the “toll” the cost-of-living crisis that escalated sharply in early 2022 has had on Irish households.
“While inflation has started to fall in recent months, Irish households will be feeling the impact of the record-high inflation of recent years for some time yet,” he said.
The survey showed that households were spending an average of €184.56 per week on housing costs, including mortgage payments and rent, an increase of 12.3 per cent from the last survey. Housing expenditure as a proportion of total expenditure, however, declined from 19.6 per cent in 2015-2016 to 18.3 per cent in the latest study despite sharp increases in rents and interest rates over that period.
This is likely attributable to the relatively large increase in food and energy prices over that time alongside other factors, including changes in the definition of household used by the CSO to gather information. Previously, for example, two individuals sharing cooking arrangements at a single address would have been one household. Now, flatmates or housemates who do not share expenditure were considered as separate households, the CSO said.
Other compositional effects – including an increase in the number of young adults living at home from census 2016 to census 2022 – may also factor into the decline in housing as a proportion of total household expenditure.
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