Methodology and sources

Our principles

• Official data first. Every chart and map layer uses ABS, RBA, AIHW or state government data published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. NHSAC figures are quoted with credit.
• Latest release, last five years. Every measure uses the most recent official release and charts the last five years. Where a source only publishes yearly or with each Census, we label the figure "Latest available" and say when the next release is due.
• Commercial data is linked, not copied. SQM Research, Cotality, PropTrack and Domain figures are linked or briefly quoted with credit, never charted or downloaded.
• Show the working. Every derived number has its formula and assumptions below.
• No spin. The tracker reports what the data says, including when a measure improves. PublicSquare's services are listed separately from the data.

Data sources and licences

How each measure is calculated

Price to earnings ratio

Mean price of residential dwellings for the quarter (ABS) ÷ (full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings × 52) (ABS, original series). We pair June-quarter prices with May earnings and December-quarter prices with November earnings. This is one full-time worker's pay, not household income, so it reads higher than household-income measures.

Years to save a deposit and the calculator

Headline: (20% × mean dwelling price) ÷ (15% × annual full-time earnings), with no starting savings, no interest and no price growth.

The calculator uses the same logic as PublicSquare's Before You Move In calculator: upfront cost = deposit + stamp duty + LMI + $2,000 conveyancing + $600 building and pest. LMI is an indicative premium on the loan: 1.9% at a 10% deposit and 4.2% at a 5% deposit, nil at 20%. The 5% Deposit Scheme (First Home Guarantee) removes LMI if the price is under the cap: $1.5m Sydney / NSW regional centres, $1.0m Brisbane / QLD regional centres, $950,000 Melbourne / Geelong, $850,000 Perth (as at July 2026). Above the cap the calculator shows a 5% deposit with LMI. Stamp duty uses owner-occupier rates and first-home concessions for NSW and QLD only; other states leave duty out and say so. Years to save = (upfront cost − savings so far) ÷ (income × savings rate).

Mortgage repayments as a share of pay

Standard principal-and-interest repayment on 80% of the mean dwelling price over 30 years, at the RBA's latest banks' discounted variable owner-occupier rate (Table F5), ×12 ÷ annual full-time earnings.

Rents vs wages

Chart: the ABS CPI rents index (weighted average of eight capital cities, seasonally adjusted, June and December quarters) and AWE full-time ordinary time earnings (May and November), each rebased to May 2021 = 100. Headline: the annual change in the ABS monthly CPI rents index for Australia, which is more recent than the quarterly series.

1.2 million homes target

Completions: the sum of ABS dwelling units completed (all buildings, all sectors, seasonally adjusted) from the September quarter 2024, the first quarter of the Accord. This reproduces NHSAC's published figure: our sum to March quarter 2026 is 308,649 against NHSAC's "about 308,000". Approvals: ABS total dwelling units approved (original, all sectors), rolling 12-month sum. Both are compared with the 240,000-a-year pace (1.2 million ÷ 5 years). NHSAC's expected completion date is quoted unchanged.

Home ownership by age and social housing waitlists

Quoted from AIHW publications without recalculation.

Local area heat map

The map covers all 548 local government areas (LGAs) in the ABS's 2025 boundaries (ASGS Edition 3). It opens on current data. Each layer is split into six groups of about the same number of councils; the legend shows the exact ranges and how many councils fall in each.

Current layers

Why this income estimate

Rents are current but no official source publishes current household income by council. We grow each council's 2021 Census median household income by its state's wage price index. We chose this over ABS Personal Income in Australia (taxation data by LGA) because that series measures individual taxpayers rather than households, and its latest year still trails the rent data by more than two years. The estimate has known biases: household income covers owners as well as renters (renters' incomes are usually lower, which would make the true share higher), new-lease rents run above what sitting tenants pay (which pushes the other way), and wage rates don't capture changes in hours worked, employment or welfare payments. It is labelled as an estimate everywhere it appears.

Joining state data to council boundaries

Each state publishes rents by council name, so we join names to ABS LGA 2025 codes. Most match directly. Checked by hand: NSW's report still uses the pre-2016 name "Western Plains Regional" for Dubbo Regional, "Nambucca" for Nambucca Valley and "Gundagai" for Cootamundra-Gundagai (the report has one row for every one of NSW's 128 councils, and that is the only row for this council). South Australian names carry suffixes such as "(DC)" and older forms such as "Port Pirie City and Dists". Victoria's report shortens four names that the ABS qualifies: "Latrobe", "Bayside" and "Kingston" are the Victorian councils (ABS "(Vic.)"), and "Mornington Penin'a" is Mornington Peninsula. Every source row joins to exactly one council; the build fails if any row is left over or two rows land on one council.

Working out WA and Tasmanian council rents from bond records

WA and Tasmania don't publish rents by council; they release a record for each bond. We take every new bond lodged in the latest quarter (Jul–Sep 2026 for WA, 19,896 records; Apr–Jun 2026 for Tasmania, the latest full quarter released, 4,038 records) and place it in a council by its suburb and postcode. The suburb-to-council lookup is built from the ABS's own geography: the Mesh Block allocation files for suburbs and localities (ASGS 2021), postal areas (2021) and LGAs (2025) are joined on Mesh Block, weighted by each Mesh Block's 2021 Census dwelling count, and each suburb-and-postcode pair goes to the council holding most of its dwellings (falling back to suburb, then postcode). 99.8% of WA bonds and all Tasmanian bonds matched on suburb and postcode. A small number of suburbs straddle two councils; their bonds go to the council with most of the suburb's homes. Rents under $50 or over $5,000 a week are dropped as recording errors (17 in WA, 1 in Tasmania). The median covers every dwelling type together: WA's records carry no dwelling type, and we treat Tasmania the same way so the two are comparable. Councils with fewer than 10 bonds in the quarter are grey.

Checks: the Tasmanian files hold 4,038 new bonds for Apr–Jun 2026 with a state median of $520, the same count and median as published analyses of the same data; after dropping 1 out-of-range rent our median is still $520. For WA, our suburb medians for Jul–Sep 2026 match published suburb figures from the same bond data: West Perth $750 (181 bonds), Success $800 (67), Northbridge $725 (29), Mindarie $963 (32).

Small numbers and suppression

NSW doesn't publish a median where 10 or fewer bonds were lodged and flags 11 to 30 as small; Queensland, Victoria and SA suppress very small counts too. For the published state tables we show a council only where at least 30 new bonds were lodged in the quarter. For our own WA and Tasmanian medians the cut-off is 10 bonds, so more of WA's small inland councils can be shown. Grey councils: NSW 26, Vic 11, Qld 37, SA 28, WA 70, Tas 3 (175 in total). The tooltip gives the cut-off for each state. Approvals rates aren't shown where the population is under 1,000.

States without current council rents

• Northern Territory: The NT doesn't publish council-level rents or open bond records (checked 17 Oct 2026), so there is nothing to map yet.
• Australian Capital Territory: The ACT doesn't publish open bond records or rents by region (checked 17 Oct 2026), so there is nothing to map yet.

Why there is no price-to-income layer by council

The ABS publishes dwelling prices for states and territories only. Council-level sale prices come from each state's Valuer-General or housing department, under different licences and with different coverage, so a consistent national layer isn't possible on open data. NSW's Rent and Sales Report does publish median sale prices by council (CC BY 4.0) and we hold them in the data file; we haven't mapped them because a one-state layer would leave most of the map grey. State-level price to income is shown on the main page.

Older measures: Census 2021

Rental stress and mortgage stress (the share of renter or mortgaged households paying more than 30% of household income on housing) are ABS-published figures from the August 2021 Census, read from QuickStats for each council. They are kept as a secondary, dated option because they are the only open council-level measures of how many households are stretched. They describe 2021, before the interest-rate rises that began in May 2022. Councils with fewer than 50 renter or mortgaged households in the Census are grey. When 2026 Census results are released (from mid-2027) these layers and the income base for the rent-to-income estimate will be replaced with 2026 figures.

Spot check against the published tables (17 Oct 2026)

WA and Tasmanian rows: the source median and bond count are our own figures from the bond records (see above). Units: rents and incomes are dollars per week. Quarters differ by state (shown in each tooltip and in the table above). Join keys: ABS LGA 2025 codes.

How the tracker updates

Each metric, where it comes from and how it is refreshed:

The refresh job is drafted but not yet switched on. Once scheduled, it will run each weekday shortly after the ABS's 11:30am AEST release time. It checks for new data, downloads it, recalculates the derived figures and runs checks before anything changes on the page:

• Validation. The period must be newer than the one live, every state must be present, and values must be within normal ranges.
• Human review. A person reviews before publishing if a figure moves more than its review threshold: dwelling price or earnings more than ±5% in a quarter, annual rents or CPI growth more than 1.5 percentage points from the last reading, monthly approvals more than ±25%, the mortgage rate more than 0.75 points, or any past figure revised by more than 2%.
• Staleness labels. Each metric has an expected release date. If a figure is more than a month past it, or the source only publishes yearly or with the Census, the page shows "Latest available" with the reason and the next expected date.
• Fail safe. If a check fails, the previous figures stay live and we get an alert.

Revision log

Date	Change
17 Oct 2026	Added council rents for Victoria (Homes Victoria, Jul–Sep 2025, the latest quarter published), Western Australia (Jul–Sep 2026) and Tasmania (Apr–Jun 2026). WA and Tasmanian medians are worked out by us from the state bond records. Rent-to-income now covers 349 councils in six states, and the council map now opens on it. The NT and ACT stay grey: neither publishes open bond records.
17 Oct 2026	First published. The council map opens on new homes approved per 1,000 residents (every council) and also shows current data: new-lease median rents from the NSW, Queensland and South Australian bond agencies, a 2026 rent-to-income estimate (Census income indexed by the Wage Price Index) and approvals to August 2026. Census 2021 stress layers moved under "Older measures". Rent layers cover the states that publish council rents; the rest are shown grey with the reason.

Corrections and contact

Found an error? Email support@publicsquare.com.au and we'll fix it and log the change here.

Data © Commonwealth of Australia and Reserve Bank of Australia, used under CC BY 4.0. Derived calculations © PublicSquare, CC BY 4.0. This tracker is general information, not financial advice.

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