Roy Morgan Update November 25, 2025: Consumer Confidence, Inflation Expectations and Mortgage Stress

In this week's Market Research Update, we present the latest data on Consumer Confidence, Inflation Expectations and Mortgage Stress.

Welcome to the Roy Morgan Weekly update.

Let’s start with Consumer Confidence – the latest week’s ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence was up 2.9 points to 87.1.

The increase was driven by positive moves in all five underlying questions comprising the index.

To really understand what is going on ‘beneath the surface’ with Consumer Confidence we need to delve into the components of the index.

The Consumer Confidence Index consists of five questions.

Two about personal finances:

• Would you say your family is financially better off or worse off than you were this time last year?
• This time next year do you and your family expect to be better off or worse off than you are now?

Two about the Australian economy’s performance:

• Thinking about economic conditions in Australia as a whole. In the next 12 months do you expect well have good times financially, bad times or some good and some bad.

One question about major household purchases:

• Whether now is a ‘good or bad time to buy major household items’ – the main driver of this week’s increase.

The ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Rating is the simple unweighted average of the difference between the percentage of respondents who give a favourable and those who give unfavourable answers to five key questions plus 100.

The current ANZ Roy Morgan result of 87.1 is clearly well below the neutral level of 100. In fact, more Australians are giving a negative response to all five questions than positive response – so all questions are currently in negative territory.

This has been the case since early September. At that time, the question related to personal finances over the next year was briefly in positive territory – following the Reserve Bank’s last interest rate cut in mid-August.

Since then, all five questions have been in negative territory for the last 11 weeks.

Over the last two weeks Consumer Confidence has increased by 3.6pts – and most of that increase has been driven by a single question – related to buying conditions.

The question relating to whether now is a ‘good or bad time to buy major household items’ has increased by a net 11 percentage points over the last two weeks – heading into this week’s Black Friday sales weekend.

‘Good time to buy’ has increased from 20% two weeks ago to 27% this week – up 7% points, and ‘Bad time to buy’ has decreased from 37%, down to 33% - down 4% points – Overall, a net increase of 11% points.

In fact, this is the largest two week jump for this question since November 2023 – also leading into Black Friday two weeks ago when this question jumped by a net 12% points.

Unfortunately, this also means results for this question are likely to drop away in December and perhaps drag the whole index down again leading into Christmas.

Inflation expectations are up. The weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan Inflation Expectations increased 0.2% to 5.4% this week

So, Australians are now expecting annual inflation of 5.4% each year over the next two years – the highest level of Inflation Expectations for nearly two years since December 2023.

And now to Mortgage Stress.

The latest Roy Morgan estimates show mortgage stress down in October, by 0.6%. Now 25.3% of Australians with a mortgage, are ‘At Risk’ of mortgage stress – an estimated 1.33 million Australians.

Mortgage stress has proven sensitive to interest rate decisions and has now declined by 2.6% following the Reserve Bank’s decision to cut interest rates in August to 3.6%.

This is the lowest level of mortgage stress for almost three years since early 2023.

And finally today the latest Roy Morgan readership figures for the 12 months to September 2025 show that NEWS continues to matter – to the vast majority of Australians.

97% of Australians, an estimated 22.4 million, consume news in any given month either in papers or digitally via online outlets or apps.

The most widely read category of news remains the ‘General News’ category with a unique audience (or read by) 22 million Australians – equivalent to 96% of the population.

Property continues to be highly popular with over two-thirds of Australians, 70%, turning to the Property section – the second most popular overall.

In third place is Sport, read by 12.9 million Australians – 56% of the population, followed by Entertainment & Culture on 11.9 million, Lifestyle & Health on 11.2 million, and Business and Finance read by 9.7 million.

A look at the top brands in news in Australia shows ABC News has the largest unique audience of 12.6 million Australians, just in front of news.com.au with a unique audience of 12 million – both reaching over 50% of the population.

Other widely read news brands include nine.com.au with an audience of 10 million, 7News.com.au with 8.1 million, The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald with 7.8 million and the Daily Mail with 7.7 million – all reaching over 30% of Australians.

Turning to magazines, the latest Roy Morgan figures on Magazine readership released today show over 14.6 million Australians read magazines – either in print or online.

The two most widely read magazines are Coles Magazine, with a readership of 4.7 million Australians and Fresh Ideas (from Woolworths) with a readership of over 4.3 million.

The most widely read paid magazines are Better Homes & Gardens with a readership of 1.66 million, The Australian Women’s Weekly with a readership of around 1.2 million and National Geographic with a readership of over 1 million.