Housing affordability

Housing affordability is the ability of a household to afford the cost of housing. Housing affordability recognises people live in diverse tenures based on their income and circumstances, and that housing should be affordable, stable and supportive of their aspirations and wellbeing. This page lists key resources that can be used to understand housing costs and tenure types.

The NSW Housing Strategy highlights affordability as one of the 4 pillars of the housing system. The strategy sets a vision for housing that is affordable and secure.

Housing rent and sales dataset

The Rent and Sales report contains median weekly rent and median sales price statistics by local government area.

Applicable areas

Greater Sydney: Yes | Regional NSW: Yes


	Access list of all issues of Rent and Sales report.
	Download the Median Weekly Rent data
	This report covers: LGA
	From: 2011 To: Ongoing Frequency: Quarterly
Key terms	Total Bonds: live bonds held at the last date of the quarter. Strata title properties: usually include town houses, terraces/villas, flats/units (multi-unit dwellings). Non-strata title properties: usually refer to a separate house.
Usage notes	Median weekly rent can be filtered by dwellings type (e.g. house, flat) and/or number of bedrooms. Median sales price can be filtered by strata or non-strata. For confidentiality; rents in any geographical area where the number of new bonds is 10 or less are not reported sale prices in any geographical area where the number of sales is 10 or less are not reported Statistics calculated from sample sizes between 10 and 30 are shown by an ‘s’ in the relevant table.These data should be treated with caution, particularly when assessing quarterly and annual changes The total number of rental bonds held does not equal the total number of rental properties. This is because at any given time some properties are vacant and there are cases where bonds are not required by a landlord from their tenant (e.g. informal lettings). Individual sales are allocated into time periods according to their contract date. Generally, the vendor and purchaser agree on the sale price on or before the contract date. In many instances there is a considerable time lapse between the contract and transfer dates. Accordingly, in assigning a time period to each property sale, the contract date is considered to be more relevant for market price analyses than the transfer date. The sales data is reported three months after the end of the reference quarter when on average about 80% of the contracted sales have been notified. A variety of factors create anomalies in the sale price attributed to particular properties.To ensure that the statistics reflect the market price of a typical residential dwelling the lower and upper 5% of sale prices for each LGA have been excluded. New procedures have been introduced in the production of Rent and Sales tables from September 2017. This has produced a break in the rent series and comparisons with tables from old procedures (any reports prior to September 2017) may not be valid.
Source	Sales statistics: derived from information provided on the ‘Notice of Sale or Transfer of Land’ form that is lodged with Land and Property Information NSW. Rental statistics: derived from information provided on the rental bond lodgement form that is lodged with Renting & Strata Services Branch (RSSB) of the Office of Fair Trading.
Last updated	This information was last updated in April 2021.

Related resources

Other housing pillars

The department acknowledges that the affordability of housing is fundamentally linked to the other key pillars of housing; supply, diversity and resilience. It should be considered alongside these areas of information.

Income and social health and wellbeing

Information about income, employment, social health and wellbeing can inform current understandings people's ability to afford housing costs, as well as the delivery of housing at different price points. Current measures of household income and social health and wellbeing are good indicators for understanding the ability of households to afford the cost of housing.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data by region: The ABS presents a range of information on household income, including median household income, select government pensions and allowances (such as the age pension or rental assistance) and a measure of housing stress. Data is sourced from the Census of Population and Housing (a count of every person and home in Australia) data for 2011 and 2016, and various data for 2014 to 2019.

Demography and Housing Dashboard; breaks down and visualises Census household income by household type as well as households with very low to moderate incomes who spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Visit the Greater Sydney dashboard and the regional NSW dashboard.

Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA): The SEIFA are 4 measures produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that ranks areas according to relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage. It is based on information from the Census. The ABS broadly defines relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage in terms of people's access to material and social resources and their ability to participate in society. This was last released for 2016.