Samoa policy interest rate
Samoa has NO administered policy rate. The Central Bank of Samoa operates a MONETARY TARGETING framework under the Central Bank of Samoa Act 2015: the intermediate target is broad money (M2), and the operating tool is open market operations in CBS Securities (CBSS), supported by rediscount/repurchase standing facilities and a Statutory Reserve Deposit (SRD) ratio of about 4.5% of bank deposit liabilities. What CBS itself publishes and names as the 'CBS Official Interest rate' is the weighted-average yield emerging from its CBSS auctions — an OUTCOME of the liquidity operation, not a level the Board votes on. The Board sets a monetary policy STANCE once a year (Monetary Policy Statement, issued each July for the financial year to 30 June) and states a medium-term NEUTRAL TARGET RANGE of 2–3 percent for this official rate.
| Current value | 3.42 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2026-04-30 |
| Official source | Central Bank of Samoa — Monetary Policy Statement for the Financial Year 2026/2027 (Apia, July 2026), s.3.2.1.3 Monetary Developments and Table 1A 'Interest Rates and Liquidity': 'the CBS's official rate increased to 3.42 percent at end April 2026 from 1.1 percent at end June 2025' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
STRUCTURAL POINT, read before serving: this is NOT a policy rate in the BCCR/RBNZ sense. CBS does not announce rate decisions; it announces a stance. The Board of Directors met on 29 June 2026 and 'decided to keep its monetary policy unchanged for FY2026/2027' — i.e. it continued the stance set on 27 June 2025 (absorb excess liquidity via CBSS issuance while steering the official rate toward the 2–3% medium-term neutral range). The 3.42% figure is the latest OBSERVED value published by CBS, as at end April 2026, and it is ABOVE the 2–3% neutral band — the MPS says so explicitly ('eventually surpassing the medium target range'). It rose because the bulk of CBS securities in FY2025/2026 were issued at higher yields and at longer tenors (182-day and 364-day paper) to drain post-pandemic liquidity; it is market-determined and can move between publications without any Board action. Do NOT describe a change in this number as a rate cut or hike. The 2–3% neutral range is the closest thing Samoa has to a stated policy-rate target. Inflation context from the same MPS: headline forecast to rise from 1.0% (CBS's measure, May 2026) to 3.8% by June 2027, slightly above the CBS medium-term inflation target of 3.0%, driven by oil prices linked to the US–Iran conflict, and expected to fall back below 3.0% in FY2027/2028. ACCESS NOTE: every CBS publication is a PDF and cbs.gov.ws serves them with an image-heavy layout — WebFetch's converter returns binary garbage; the PDF must be downloaded and text-extracted locally. The CBS 'Current MP Stance' page (https://cbs.gov.ws/current-mp-stance) is STALE — as of 23 Jul 2026 it still lists only the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 stance documents; the Monetary Policy Statement index page (https://cbs.gov.ws/monetary-policy-statement) is the live one and correctly carries MPS-2026-2027.pdf. Point the source-watcher at the MPS index page, expect one new MPS each July, plus quarterly bulletins (https://cbs.gov.ws/media/Quarterly-Bulletin-March2026.pdf) that refresh the official-rate observation between MPSs — hence the 90-day cycle.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-07-01 | 0.15 | CBS — MPS 2026/2027, Table 1A: CBS Official Interest rate 0. |
| 2022-07-01 | 0.23 | CBS — MPS 2026/2027, Table 1A: CBS Official Interest rate 0. |
| 2024-07-01 | 1.09 | CBS — MPS 2026/2027, Table 1A: CBS Official Interest rate 1. |
Get it programmatically
curl https://ausref.dev/v1/ws/policy-rate
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://ausref.dev/v1/ws/policy-rate/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/ws/policy-rateOther Samoa series: VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates