Coverage

Censible covers every part of Australia with 618 figures from the 2011, 2016 and 2021 Censuses, set on the ABS's 2026 boundaries, with projections for 2026 and 2031. This page lists the areas, topics and years included, and when each source is updated.

Last updated

Areas

Each standard area is on the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 4, the boundaries the ABS has set for the 2026 Census.

  • Australia, and each state and territory.
  • Capital city regions, such as Greater Sydney and Rest of NSW, which the ABS calls Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA).
  • Councils (local government areas, LGA).
  • Suburbs and localities (SAL).
  • Postcodes (postal areas, POA).
  • Statistical Areas Levels 1 to 4 (SA1 to SA4). The ABS describes an SA1 as having 200 to 800 residents, about 400 on average, and an SA4 in a capital city as having 300,000 to 500,000.

An area of your own is built from the SA1s inside it, each weighted by the share of its residents who live within the boundary, using the ABS's mesh block counts. It can be a circle of 1 to 10 km, a drive of 5 to 30 minutes or a walk of 5 to 20 minutes around a point, a shape drawn on the map, or a group of standard areas. Drive and walk times follow OpenStreetMap's roads and assume no traffic. A site set holds up to 500 of your own locations, each with the same kind of catchment.

Topics

The 618 figures fall into nine topics. Of these, 600 are shares, rates or averages, 12 are counts and 6 are medians.

  • People (67): population, median age, ten-year age groups, five-year age groups by sex, marital status, citizenship, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the shares born overseas or speaking a language other than English at home, where people lived one and five years earlier, and visitors on census night.
  • Cultural background (344): 49 countries of birth, 35 countries of birth by six periods of arrival along with everyone born overseas by period, 36 languages spoken at home, 30 ancestries, 12 religious affiliations including no religion, and proficiency in English.
  • Households and families (31): family and household types, household size, life stages such as couples with children under 15 or people living alone at 65 and over, and motor vehicles per household.
  • Housing (53): dwelling types down to flats by the height of the building, bedrooms, tenure and type of landlord, median weekly rent and monthly mortgage repayment, and the bands of each.
  • Income (19): median weekly personal, family and household income, and personal and household income bands.
  • Household spending (20): spending a year on nine categories, in total and per household, modelled from the ABS Monthly Household Spending Indicator for the latest 12 months.
  • Work (42): unemployment, participation and employment rates, full-time and part-time work, eight occupations, 19 industries, and how people travelled to work.
  • Education (25): highest qualification, field of study, and current study from preschool to university.
  • Health and unpaid work (17): ten long-term health conditions, people who need help with everyday activities, unpaid care for people and children, volunteering and housework.

The full list, with each figure's definition and unit, is in the app and in the API's list of metrics.

A sample download (CSV) shows 24 of these figures for Brunswick in Victoria beside Australia, with the census year and notes on each.

Census years

Each census year is shown on the 2026 boundaries, and where a boundary has changed since that census, its figures are apportioned with ABS correspondences, weighted by population, and marked as estimated.

  • 2021: 598 figures, which is every figure except household spending.
  • 2016: 358 of them.
  • 2011: 232 of them.

The 238 figures available for 2021 alone are mostly countries of birth by period of arrival and long-term health conditions, which the Census first asked about in 2021. Dollar figures for 2011, 2016 and 2021 are in each census's own dollars, not adjusted for inflation, and 2021 work and travel-to-work figures carry a note wherever they appear, because the Census fell during lockdowns in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT.

Projections for 2026 and 2031

Census figures are projected to 2026 and 2031 in one of four ways, and each projection is labelled as one in the app, in reports and in API responses until 2026 Census results replace it.

  • Population and age (49 figures) are grown with the ABS's estimated resident population to mid-2025 and Geoscience Australia's population projections.
  • Dollar figures (36), such as incomes, rents and mortgage repayments, are given in each year's dollars. Incomes are moved forward to 2026 with the ABS wage price index and rents with the rents series in the CPI, while mortgage repayments, and every dollar figure after 2026, follow Australia's change in the median between 2016 and 2021.
  • 68 shares are moved by their trend between censuses, chosen where a backtest found that the trend predicted 2021 better than no change, at both SA2 and SA1.
  • The remaining shares are held at their 2021 value.

Updates

The ABS plans to publish 2026 Census results in three releases, the first in June 2027, as set out in 2026 Census results: three releases from June 2027. Each release is added to Censible on the day the ABS publishes it.

The other sources follow the ABS's own schedules: estimated resident population each year, the wage price index and the CPI each quarter, and the Monthly Household Spending Indicator each month. Data updates are listed in the changelog, and how each source is processed and credited is set out on Data and sources.

Contact

Need a figure or an area that isn't listed? hello@censible.com.au