Abstract

This paper introduces the Household Expectations Survey (HES), a newly designed data collection initiative aimed at improving the measurement and analysis of household expectations in Türkiye. While expectations of financial and real sector experts are gathered through the Survey of Market Participants and the Business Tendency Survey, respectively, household expectations have traditionally been inferred from the Consumer Tendency Survey. However, concerns persist regarding respondents’ comprehension and interpretation of inflation related questions within that framework. To address these limitations, the HES has been implemented by TURKSTAT on behalf of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye since August 2025, with the objective of eliciting household expectations in a clearer, more detailed, and analytically robust manner. A key innovation of the HES is the systematic use of information treatment within the survey design, an approach applied for the first time in household surveys in Türkiye, which allows for a direct assessment of how targeted information affects the formation and updating of expectations. The survey is conducted as a monthly panel with a large sample size, enabling the analysis of time-varying effects, dynamic relationships, and the immediate impact of unexpected shocks on expectations. Beyond inflation expectations, the HES collects comprehensive information on households’ expectations regarding exchange rates, housing prices, consumption, wages, and access to finance, and also includes measures of financial literacy. In addition, questions on investment choices provide novel insights into households’ saving and portfolio preferences, offering information that is not available in existing household surveys in Türkiye. Another unique contribution of the HES is its ability to capture expectations related to wage dynamics among employed households. In particular, the survey measures households’ expectations regarding wage increases and minimum wage adjustments before official announcements by the government, allowing for the analysis of expectation formation in advance of policy relevant information releases. Empirical evidence indicates that inflation inferred from the HES in December 2025 is approximately 6 percentage points lower than those obtained from existing household survey (Consumer Tendency Survey), suggesting that improved question design and information treatments lead to systematically different and potentially more accurate expectation measures. Selected questions further incorporate information treatments designed to assess how the provision of information influences the formation of expectations. By offering a rich panel dataset with novel content not available in existing household surveys, the HES provides valuable inputs for monetary policy formulation and opens new avenues for academic research on expectations, information frictions, wage setting perceptions, saving behavior, and household decision making.