RDP 2020-06: Consumer Payment Behaviour in Australia: Evidence from the 2019 Consumer Payments Survey 2. Survey Overview

The CPS is a national cross-sectional survey that has been conducted every three years since 2007. The 2019 CPS comprised three sections: a pre-diary questionnaire about the demographic characteristics of respondents; a payments diary; and a post-survey questionnaire focusing on respondents' payment preferences and attitudes. In the diary, respondents recorded details about each transaction and cash withdrawal that they initiated over a seven-day period (automatic payments over the week were recorded in the post-diary survey). For each transaction, respondents reported the value, payment method, payment channel (e.g. if they tapped or inserted their card, made a payment using an app) and the type of merchant. For each cash withdrawal, respondents reported the value and source of the top-up (e.g. an ATM); they also reported their banknote holdings at the start and end of the diary period. Respondents were asked to include only personal transactions in their diary, not those made for business reasons.

The survey was delivered online for most respondents but to ensure the sample was broadly representative of the Australian population, participants without internet access were recruited by telephone to complete a paper-based survey. Participants were recruited to the survey to ensure that the sample was consistent with Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey population benchmarks for age, sex, household income, state of residence, credit card ownership and internet access (where necessary, the Reserve Bank weighted responses to align the sample with these benchmarks; see Appendix A for more information). A total of 1,115 people participated in the 2019 CPS, recording around 13,500 payments, 800 cash withdrawals and 1,500 automatic payments in their seven-day diary periods. For further details on the survey, see Appendix A.