The inflation rate was 1.3 per cent in the past year - unless you’re an age pensioner, in which case it was 2.4 per cent, official figures show.

In the past five years, the consumer price index (CPI) has risen by 16 per cent, but most age pensioners would not be surprised to find official figures confirm their cost of living is rising faster.

The CPI is generally seen as a good yardstick for measuring the cost of living.

And it is, on average, at least for households located in the state and territory capitals where the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collects its raw CPI price data.

Most households derive their income primarily from wages, so it should be no surprise that the cost of living index for such households has risen by about the same margin as the CPI over the past five years.

The increase in employees’ cost of living between the September 2004 quarter to the September 2009 quarter was 16.9 per cent, according to data released by the ABS on Monday.

That was only 0.2 percentage points faster per year than the CPI.

But there are other households where the gap between the cost of living and the CPI has widened even more.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) also calculates cost of living measures for different sub-groups.

For self-funded retirees, the rise has been a little slower, 16.7 per cent, but it still beat the CPI.

But for those on age pensions and other government transfer payments, mostly linked to the CPI, the gap is significantly wider.

In the five years to September, the cost of living for those householders rose by 18.9 per cent, beating the CPI by 2.9 per cent in total.

It has not always been like this - the pensioners have recently leap-frogged over the employees as mortgage interest payments fell back in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The ABS said employees’ cost of living had actually fallen by one per cent over the year to September, with the mortgage interest charges component of their costs dropping by 33.5 per cent.

But that followed a 6.1 per cent rise in the cost of living through the year before, boosted by the restrictive monetary policy of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and a consequent 22.7 per cent jump in mortgage servicing costs, not to mention a 25.4 per cent jump in the cost of automotive fuel.

At the same time, inflation measured by the CPI was 1.3 per cent in the latest year, a marked slowdown from 5.0 per cent a year earlier.

The rise in the cost of living for pensioners has not turned down the way it did for employees, though - it rose by 2.4 per cent in the past year after jumping by 4.7 per cent the year before.

For other beneficiaries, the cost of living rose 1.6 per cent over the year to September after a 5.5 per cent rise in the previous year, while for self-fund retirees, a 1.6 per cent annual rise followed an increase of 4.7 per cent.

AAP