Australia's Highest-Earning Suburbs: The Full National Ranking

How much the typical household earns varies enormously from suburb to suburb: by nearly eight times between the top and bottom of the range. Recent media coverage has zeroed in on Sydney's top 1% and what it takes to join it, mostly behind paywalls and mostly about a handful of harbourside postcodes.

Here is the free, national picture instead: every state and territory, from Census data, with every suburb linked to its full profile. We rank the 25 highest-earning suburbs in the country, the top 10 in each state, and, because income is only half the story, where earnings and house prices pull furthest apart.

All income figures are ABS 2021 Census median weekly household incomes (the most recent suburb-level release), and we're building a more current, ATO-based income layer for an updated analysis soon. Across the 5,018 Australian suburbs with at least 500 residents and income data, the national median is $1,727 a week, about $89,800 a year. Keep that yardstick in mind as you scroll.

The national top 25

Prices are our stabilised trailing medians, shown only where a suburb has at least five recent recorded sales in our property sources (coverage is currently strongest for NSW, VIC and SA). "—" means no reliable figure; "(unit)" marks an apartment median used where house sales are too thin.

A few things jump out. Sydney takes 19 of the 25 places, and the top of the list isn't the harbourside trophy suburbs the top-1% stories revolve around. The three highest-earning suburbs in Australia (Northwood, Longueville and Riverview) all share postcode 2066 on the leafy Lane Cove peninsula: professional-family territory, where nearly every household is a dual-income one in peak earning years. Point Piper, Australia's most expensive housing with a $35M house median, ranks 11th on income. Wealth and income are different things.

The six non-Sydney entries tell their own story: Perth's old-money river suburbs Dalkeith and Peppermint Grove, Adelaide's Springfield in the foothills, Canberra's diplomatic-belt O'Malley and Red Hill, and Brisbane's acreage enclave Pullenvale. Victoria is entirely absent: its highest-earning suburb, Lysterfield South at $3,223 a week, falls well short of the $3,874 cut-off.

The top 10 in every state

New South Wales

Lower-north-shore and northern-beaches suburbs fill the NSW list; Greenhills Beach in the Sutherland Shire is the newest entrant: a small, recently built estate where almost every household is a working family.

Victoria

Melbourne's list looks nothing like Sydney's: it's dominated by outer-east acreage and lifestyle suburbs (Lysterfield South, Park Orchards, Plenty) rather than the inner-east establishment, though Canterbury flies the flag at number 10.

Queensland

Brisbane's western acreage belt (Pullenvale, Brookfield, Fig Tree Pocket) leads, with Townsville's Castle Hill the only entry outside the capital.

Western Australia

WA is the clearest split on the list: half river-and-coast Perth (Dalkeith, City Beach, Floreat), half Pilbara mining towns (Nickol and Dampier near Karratha, Port Hedland, Mount Sheila) where resource wages push the median household past $3,400 a week.

South Australia

Adelaide's establishment belt (Springfield, Medindie, Unley Park) with one structural outlier: the purpose-built mining town of Roxby Downs at number 3.

Tasmania

Hobart's newer hillside and peninsula suburbs lead a list whose top figure, Tolmans Hill at $3,316, would rank just 24th in NSW.

Australian Capital Territory

Canberra is the quiet achiever of Australian incomes: secure public-sector salaries mean even its number-10 suburb out-earns the top suburb in Tasmania, and brand-new estates like Denman Prospect and Throsby arrive on the list within a few years of being built.

Northern Territory

The Territory's list mixes Darwin/Palmerston family suburbs with pure structural entries: the mining towns of Alyangula (Groote Eylandt) and Nhulunbuy, and Tindal, which is effectively a RAAF base.

The other end of the range

The same data shows Australia's lowest-earning suburbs, and it's worth being clear about what that does and doesn't mean. A low median household income is usually a structural signal, not a verdict on a place: retiree and holiday towns run on pensions and superannuation rather than wages; former industrial towns carry the legacy of a closed mill or mine; remote communities reflect decades of limited economic opportunity. For buyers, several of these are also among the most affordable corners of their states.

The structural stories are visible in every row. Sapphire Central is a gemfields town of fossickers and retirees; Lamb Island and Loch Sport are retiree and holiday communities where most households are past working age, and Loch Sport's $360K median makes it one of coastal Victoria's genuine affordability stories. Kandos lost its cement works, Peterborough its railway workshops. Woorabinda is an Aboriginal community where the income data reflects generations of structural economic exclusion. And Daceyville is the strangest row in this post: a heritage garden suburb built as public housing, where the median household earns $651 a week while the houses around them carry a $2.13M median: a century-old social-housing estate now surrounded by some of Sydney's most expensive land.

Where income and prices pull apart

Ranking suburbs by the ratio of house price to annual household income turns up the post's most useful findings.

The value pockets, high-earning suburbs where housing is still moderately priced, cluster in new estates and the Canberra commuter belt. Eynesbury west of Melbourne pairs a top-15% income ($2,609/week) with a $667K median: 4.9 times the annual household income, against a ratio of about 20 in the national top 25. Williams Landing (5.9×) and the 66,000-person Point Cook (6.2×) repeat the pattern, and across the border from Canberra, Googong ($3,371/week, $1.04M, 6.0×) and Jerrabomberra ($3,403/week, 7.0×) offer top-1%-of-suburbs incomes at half a Sydney price.

The opposite corner is where prices have detached from local earnings entirely. In Bellevue Hill the median house costs $12.65M, 73 times the median household's annual income. Potts Point (65×) and Toorak (44×) tell the same story: these markets are priced by accumulated and incoming wealth, not by what current residents earn. The most surprising entries are semi-rural: Rossmore (56×) and Kemps Creek (53×) have modest incomes but $5M medians, because their acreage is being priced as future development land around the new Western Sydney airport, not as homes.

Methodology

Income figures are median weekly household incomes from the ABS 2021 Census, the most recent suburb-level income release. Rankings cover the 5,018 suburbs with at least 500 residents and reported income data; the population floor keeps tiny statistical areas and zero-population artefacts out of the tables. Medians describe the middle household, so these figures are deliberately not comparable to "top 1%" threshold stories, which are built on ATO taxable-income distributions of individuals. Annualised figures are weekly medians × 52. House prices are SuburbCheck's stabilised trailing medians (minimum five recent sales; "(unit)" marks apartment medians where house sales are too thin), currently strongest for NSW, VIC and SA. Full details on every figure: our methodology.

Read next: Where Australia's Top Earners Really Live, the promised follow-up, built on newly loaded ATO postcode tax data (2023-24): the average-vs-median gap that exposes where high earners actually concentrate. Or see what all that income buys: The School Premium tests how strongly school quality and house prices travel together, and where they don't. And for the renter's side of the ledger, The Rent Gap asks whether the typical earner can afford the typical rent in their own suburb; almost everywhere, the answer is no. The buyer's side is in What a $125,000 Income Can Actually Buy in Australia: a median household income services the median house in 93 of 1,726 priced suburbs, two of them in a capital city.