The federal government is “not currently working on” cost-of-living relief for struggling Australians, despite revealing it expects a $20 billion surplus for the past financial year.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers revealed the figure, which comes off the back of a strong labour market and high commodity prices for key exports, on Monday.

The underlying cash balance for the year to May was $19 billion, up from the $4.2 billion surplus for 2022/23 flagged in the federal budget.

It will be Australia’s first budget surplus in 15 years.

Dr Chalmers said the figure would be finalised in coming weeks.

Despite the improvement, Dr Chalmers had no immediate plans for further cost-of-living relief packages. He said the government had managed to help struggling Australians while boosting productivity “so we can lay the foundations for future growth as well”.

“The government’s main focus is on providing cost-of-living relief by rolling out the commitments we’ve made over our first two budgets,” he said.

“We’re not currently working on a new package of cost-of-living relief. We’re focused on rolling out billions of dollars in cost-of-living relief we have already announced.”

Dr Chalmers said the more recent gains would be banked as the Albanese government worked to tame inflation.

“We need to recognise that even though the budget is in much better condition in the near term, we have the longer-term intensifying pressures as well,” he said in Canberra on Monday.

“We weigh all of that up, but the approach we have taken is textbook fiscal policy, targeted relief for people but not at the expense of repairing the budget.”

Dr Chalmers said while inflation was coming down, it was still too high. More inflation data is due later this week.

“We’ve made it clear that inflation is moderating in our economy. We would like to see it moderate quicker. It will be higher than we’d like for longer than we’d like but it has come off the peak in inflation that we saw around Christmas time,” he said.

“Certainly the expectation is for less than what we saw at the beginning of 2022.”

Dr Chalmers made the announcement as he unveiled the next head of the Productivity Commission, saying strong economic foundations stemmed from “the right institutions and the right leadership of those institutions”.

Cabinet has agreed to put forward Chris Barrett, a former ambassador to the OECD and chief of staff to Labor treasurer Wayne Swan.

– with AAP