To understand why so many Australians can no longer afford to buy or rent a home, and to communicate that story through evidence-based data visualisations.
The story draws on four official datasets, all from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
The first covers house prices. The ABS Residential Property Price Indexes tracks median house prices across eight capital cities from 2002 to 2021. Since this series was discontinued after December 2021, it was combined with the ABS Total Value of Dwellings, which picks up from where the old series left off and runs through to December 2025. Joining the two gives a complete picture of how prices moved over more than two decades.
The second is the ABS Wage Price Index, which tracks wage growth across all industries. This made it possible to put house prices and wages on the same scale and see exactly where the two started pulling apart.
The third is the ABS Selected Living Cost Indexes, which measures how everyday costs have changed for different types of households employees, retirees, pensioners, and welfare recipients. This showed that even before thinking about a mortgage, most Australians were already struggling to keep up with basic living expenses.
The fourth is the 2021 Australian Census housing data, Table 8, which breaks down weekly rent by dwelling type. This grounded the final part of the story that renting, the obvious alternative to buying, was already unaffordable for a large share of the population.
This visualisation tracks how median house prices have changed across Australia’s five major capital cities over more than two decades. Each line represents one city, making it easy to compare how different markets have behaved over the same period.
Sydney has consistently been the most expensive city, crossing $1.4 million by 2025. Melbourne followed at a distance for most of the period before slowing after 2022. What stands out most, however, is what happened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Brisbane and Adelaide cities that had remained relatively affordable for years surged sharply from 2020 onward, driven by interstate migration and the rise of remote work.
The two dotted vertical lines mark two turning points in the story. The first is March 2020, when the pandemic began counterintuitively triggering a price boom rather than a collapse. The second is April 2022, when the Reserve Bank of Australia began raising interest rates at the fastest pace in a generation, causing prices in some cities to soften briefly before climbing again.
By the end of the chart, no Australian capital city remains what housing economists would consider affordable. The data shown here comes from two ABS series merged to give an unbroken view of the full period.
While the first chart showed how high prices climbed, this one shows how fast they got there. Each line tracks how much prices changed from one year to the next, making it easier to spot when the market really started moving.
For most of the 2010s things looked relatively stable, with Sydney and Melbourne having a noticeable run around 2014 to 2017 before slowing down. Then 2020 changed everything. Brisbane and Adelaide shot past 30% annual growth at the peak meaning a home could nearly double in price within just a few years. Perth, which had been going backwards for most of the decade, also surged back strongly.
When the Reserve Bank started lifting rates in April 2022 the market felt it immediately, with Melbourne briefly falling into negative territory. But that slowdown did not last. Growth rates have turned positive again in most cities, suggesting the pressure on prices has not gone away.
This chart puts house prices and wages on the same scale, both starting at 100 in June 2007, so the gap between them becomes impossible to ignore.
Wages, shown by the dotted line, have grown around 60% over nearly two decades. House prices in every city have grown far more Sydney and Melbourne have tripled, while Brisbane and Adelaide surged sharply after 2020. Even the slowest-growing city has left wages behind.
This is the heart of the affordability problem. Wages did grow, just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with what homes were costing.
Both lines start at 100 in June 2007. The dotted line tracks wage growth and the orange line tracks everyday living costs. The shaded area between them shows where living costs have pulled ahead of wages.
For most of the 2010s the two lines stayed close. From 2021 onward the gap widened sharply as inflation pushed costs up faster than wages could follow.
The extra lines in the legend welfare recipients, pensioners, and retirees can be toggled on to show that for vulnerable households, the pressure has been even worse.
When living costs eat up most of what you earn, there is simply nothing left to save for a home.
This chart shows how many rented dwellings across Australia fell into each weekly rent band in 2021, broken down by dwelling type separate houses, semi-detached homes, and flats or apartments.
The peak for all three types sits between $350 and $500 per week. At the time of the Census, the minimum wage after tax was roughly $750 per week, meaning rent alone was consuming close to half of a minimum wage worker’s income before any other bill was paid.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Residential property price indexes: Eight capital cities (Cat. No. 6416.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/residential-property-price-indexes-eight-capital-cities
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Total value of dwellings, Australia (Cat. No. 6432.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/total-value-dwellings/dec-quarter-2025
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Wage price index, Australia (Cat. No. 6345.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/wage-price-index-australia
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Selected living cost indexes, Australia (Cat. No. 6467.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Housing data summary, 2021 (Cat. No. 2049.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/housing/housing-census/latest-release
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