Spending on bait and traps in the Riverina was second only to the Central West as the plague saw mice invading crops, farming equipment, houses and vehicles.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has started using data from electronic supermarket cash registers to monitor the national economy.

One offshoot from this new program is that it revealed the impact of the plague on household spending in the Riverina.

The Riverina saw a fairly steady increase in household expenditure on mouse bait and traps at the end of last year before surging by 1400 per cent during the first week of February.

Weekly expenditure on combatting the mouse plague remained at least 1000 per cent above normal for months until it started to drop sharply in late May.

The ABS did not provide data on dollar amounts due to confidentiality issues.

Terminate Pest Control owner Craig Williams said the data matched his experience though most of the demand he had seen was from commercial properties.

"People would call us after trying to deal with it themselves in their homes. You'd go to Bunnings and all the traps and baits would be sold out," he said.

"We'd go in to buy other things and you'd see all that kind of stuff was gone.

"[Mice] were also a big problem at The Rock and it was mostly on the outskirts of Wagga."

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Mr Williams said mice numbers had dropped off since the first frost as the cold weather slowed down their breeding.

Kooringal Pest Control proprietor Glenn Lawson also said the mouse plague had died down around Wagga but at its height even wholesalers were running out of bait.

"Our chemical supplier based in Sydney was definitely getting low. We don't use traps; it's bait stations and wax blocks that you have got to be licenced to use due to high concentrations of active ingredients," he said.

"They were definitely running out of the wax blocks."

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