An occupant weight-based airbag suppression method utilizes adjustable time constant filtering and dynamic threshold adjustment to reliably determine and indicate airbag suppression status. The filter time constant is ordinarily set to a first value that provides relatively fast tracking of the raw occupant weight, but is set to a second value that provides relatively slow tracking of the raw occupant weight when both the raw and filtered occupant weights are within a specified band about the threshold value. The threshold value and band are dynamically adjusted after the suppression status is initially determined so as to effectively increase the separation between the filtered weight and the threshold.