Remoteness Area (RA)

The five classes

Remoteness Areas sort the whole country into five classes, from most to least accessible:

• Major Cities
• Inner Regional
• Outer Regional
• Remote
• Very Remote

How remoteness is measured

Remoteness Areas are based on ARIA+ (the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia Plus), produced at Adelaide University. It measures the road distance from each place to the nearest towns in five size bands, as a stand-in for access to services. The ABS gives each SA1 an average score and groups SA1s into the five classes, so the boundaries follow SA1s.

Remoteness is relative, so it can change. As towns grow or shrink, areas can move up or down a class between Censuses. The current Remoteness Areas are built from the 2021 Census, and new ones based on the 2026 Census will follow its results.

Where you'll see them

Remoteness Areas are used widely in health, education and government funding. The Modified Monash Model, which the federal health department uses for rural health programs, is built on them and splits them further by town size into seven categories, from MM 1 (major cities) to MM 7 (very remote).

Using remoteness for location decisions

For a business, remoteness is shorthand for cost and reach: freight, staffing, delivery times and how far customers will travel. It's a useful first filter when planning a national network, but it's coarse. A single class like Inner Regional covers everything from fast-growing commuter towns to quiet farming districts, so look at the places themselves before deciding.

Regional and remote areas in Censible

Censible covers regional and remote Australia the same way as the cities, from suburbs and towns to SA2s and councils. Outside the cities those areas can be very large, so one SA2 may cover several towns and the farmland between them. A catchment drawn around a town counts only the people within that distance of it.

Source: ABS, Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3, Remoteness Areas.