Information Note Household Finance and Consumption Survey 2018

Revised HFCS 2018 statistics published 4th June, 2020

Please note that as of 4th June, 2020 the statistics from the HFCS 2018 publication, including figures available on the Statbank Ireland database, have been revised. If a data user has made use of HFCS 2018 statistics obtained from these sources before this date, then it is advised that all statistical outputs are checked for disparities against the revised figures. Due to the nature of the data revision, the majority of figures available from these sources have changed from the originally published figures.

Revision details

The HFCS for 2018 has a sample size of 4,793 randomly chosen households. In order to provide national results, survey data is weighted to represent the total population of Ireland. Since results were first published in January 2020, new weights have been calculated for the HFCS dataset. This was due to coherence issues with other CSO data sources. As population statistics are derived using the weights, they are liable to change if a new weight is used. On the 4th June, 2020 revised results for HFCS 2018 were published using the new weights. The recalculated weights incorporate an additional level of calibration, that of home ownership rate by the age of reference person. As a consequence of recalculating the weights, missing values required re-imputation. The sum of weights (i.e. the total number of households in Ireland in 2018) was also revised upwards by approximately 46,000 households. Please see the ‘Background Notes’ for more detailed information on the weighting and imputation procedures.

Results changes due to revision

Due to the recalculation of weights, there are changes to HFCS 2018 population statistics published on January 30^th, 2020. The percentage change in some headline figures is shown below but users can assume that the majority of figures have changed somewhat since 4th June, 2020.