21260 – Construction Costs & Supply Chain

Node 21260 measures construction cost pressure and supply chain conditions as a contributing input to the 21200 AMVI composite, carrying a weight of 0.10. It is built from a three-component composite spanning producer price movements in construction inputs and outputs, escalation and building approvals volume, and construction-sector insolvency activity.

All three components are present in every quarter from September 2013. The insolvency component is ASIC’s quarterly count of construction companies entering external administration for the first time. Construction Costs & Supply Chain (21260) does not measure the volume or timing of new dwelling supply itself; that is the domain of New Housing Supply Forecasts (21520), a separate node within the 21500 series.

Primary metric: Node Composite Z-Score (Z₂₁₂₆₀)

Three components are drawn from two Tier-1 institutional sources: the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Producer Price Indexes and Building Approvals) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (insolvency statistics).

Note on the insolvency series. The insolvency component is ASIC’s quarterly count of construction companies entering external administration for the first time, joined to its predecessor series from September 2013. ASIC changed how it records a company’s industry in 2021, so counts before the September quarter 2021 are not comparable with later ones, and the input’s baseline uses the 18 quarters from September 2021 to December 2025.

Construction Costs & Supply Chain (21260) was first certified on 5 August 2026, and its current certified reading is for the June quarter 2026. The chart below shows the node’s reading for every quarter from March 2011. All inputs are present in every quarter from September 2013. ASIC changed how it records a company’s industry in 2021, so the construction insolvency input is comparable only from the September quarter 2021; the 20 full-coverage quarters from September 2021 to June 2026 are the history the current reading is compared with.

No population mean, standard deviation or observation count is published on this page for the composite itself, because those parameters are not part of the certified figures for this node. Where a figure is not certified, this page states NIL RETURN rather than estimating one.

The certified composite reading of +1.0353σ (Q2 2026) indicates construction cost and supply-chain pressure running above its historical average, and it is the highest reading the node has recorded on its current basis. The state-level output/input spread remains the largest contributor and construction insolvencies have risen to sit a full standard deviation above their norm; input-cost escalation and approvals volumes sit close to average.

Position. Empirical percentile rank 100.0, against the 20 full-coverage quarters the node holds on the current industry coding of its insolvency input (September 2021 to June 2026). The basis changed this quarter. Until now the node held fewer than the 20 quarters an empirical ranking requires, so its position was a model-based estimate read from the Z-score. The June quarter 2026 reading is the twentieth, so the position is now a rank against the node's own history: it sits above all 19 comparable quarters, which is what a reading of 100.0 means here.

The other eight components of Economic Factors (APN Aggregate Macro-Volatility Index™) (21200).