About

The Australian Census, lined up across 2011, 2016 and 2021

Censible puts every Census table on the ABS's 2026 boundaries and works out figures for any place: a suburb, a council, a postcode, a circle around a site, or an area you draw yourself.

See the platformData and sources
Why it exists

Census data is free, but not ready to use

It comes as thousands of tables with codes for column names, split across boundaries that change every five years. Answering a simple question, like who lives within 3 km of a store, means joining tables, carrying old counts onto new boundaries and working out medians by hand.

A retail analyst working out why one store trails the others, or a developer deciding where to build next, needs the figure along with enough of its method to defend it, and building that from the raw tables can take longer than the decision allows.

What it does

How each table is processed

Censible loads every census table, links measures across the 2011, 2016 and 2021 Censuses, and carries them onto today's boundaries. Each figure is built from the census's own counts, so it works for any shape, not just the ABS's regions.

The same figures are available in the web app, through an API, and to AI assistants through an MCP server, so a question asked in any of them gets the same answer.

How we work

Figures you can check

  1. 01Counts first, formulas lastEvery median and percentage is worked out from summed counts, never by averaging the figures of the places inside an area.
  2. 02Checked against the ABSEach metric recipe is tested against the ABS's own published figure, and where the ABS published one, that's the figure we show.
  3. 03Estimates are labelledFigures carried onto new boundaries are marked as estimated, and projections are called projections, never census results.
  4. 04Every figure explainedEach figure says what it measures, what it's based on and what it's compared with, such as Greater Sydney or the 2016 Census.
Who makes it

Built by analysts

Censible is built by analysts with over ten years of experience in retail, FMCG and data analytics.

Independent
Not affiliated with the ABS or any government agency
Data
Australian Bureau of Statistics and other open government sources

See the data for your area

Pick any suburb, postcode or council in Australia and we'll send you a sample dataset and report for it, free.

Request a sampleRead the changelog