The Rent Gap: Can the Typical Earner Afford the Typical Rent in Their Own Suburb?

Everybody's Home put rental affordability on the national agenda. Its Priced Out index asked a sharp question at the regional level: what share of income would a person on a given salary hand over to rent a typical unit? Everybody's Home released its 2026 Priced Out report this week, finding rental stress climbing the income scale, with even six-figure earners above the 30% benchmark in most regions and renters paying around $2,500 a year more than 18 months ago. Their analysis works at the regional level with benchmark incomes; ours takes the next step down, to every suburb, using actual local incomes.

The question is simple: can the typical earner in a suburb afford the typical rent in that suburb?

The answer is almost never. Of the 1,759 suburbs where we hold both numbers (NSW, Queensland and South Australia), just 28 suburbs (1.6%) have a median rent at or below 30% of the local median earner's net income, the standard rental-stress benchmark. In 1,534 suburbs (87.2%) the median rent would consume more than 45% of the local median earner's take-home pay. The remaining 197 suburbs (11.2%) sit in between.

Update, September 2026. The buying side of this question now has a national benchmark. The realestate.com.au Housing Affordability Report 2026 found a household on the median income, just over $125,000, could afford repayments on 12% of the homes sold in FY26, the lowest share on record, and a $76,000 household could afford 2%. We applied the report's assumptions suburb by suburb in What a $125,000 Income Can Actually Buy in Australia: 93 of 1,726 priced suburbs have a house median that income can service, and only two of them are in a capital city.

How we measured it

For every qualifying suburb we took the median weekly rent (the unit median where one exists, otherwise the house median), annualised it, and divided by the net income of the suburb's median taxpayer: ATO postcode-level median taxable income, converted to take-home pay using the current resident tax scale and Medicare levy. Then we classified each suburb:

• Affordable: rent takes 30% or less of the local median earner's net income
• Stressed: 30% to 45%
• Severe: more than 45%

The 30% line is the standard used across Australian housing research (the "30/40" convention popularised by AHURI, under which a household in the bottom 40% of incomes paying more than 30% of income on housing is in housing stress). We apply it to net rather than gross income, which is the more conservative and more realistic reading for a renter. Full methodology, floors and caveats are at the bottom of this post, and every score we publish is explained on our methodology page.

One framing note before the tables. This is a single-earner measure: one median taxpayer renting the median home alone. Real households often have two incomes, and sharehouses split the rent. That is precisely the point. The gap between what one ordinary local earner makes and what one ordinary local home costs to rent is the clearest single measure of how far a suburb's rental market has drifted from the people who already live there.

The national picture

Across the 1,759 suburbs measured, the median suburb's rent takes 61% of the local median earner's net income. By group: Sydney 66%, Brisbane 64%, regional Queensland 62%, regional NSW 55%, Adelaide 54%, regional SA 38%.

Put another way: to rent the median suburb's unit within the 30% benchmark, a single earner needs about $157,000 gross in Sydney, $151,000 in Brisbane and $116,000 in Adelaide. The median Australian taxpayer earns just under $60,000, which nets about $50,000 after tax and supports about $288 a week at the benchmark.

The 20 most severe gaps

Three patterns drive this table, and none of them is a data quirk. First, the CBD paradox: Sydney's city core and Haymarket pair $1,200-a-week units with a median taxable income of just $40,697, because the taxpayers who live there include large numbers of students and early-career hospitality and service workers. The rent is paid by higher earners, sharers and newcomers, not the median local. Second, the coastal-lifestyle belt: Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast suburbs like Reedy Creek, Currumbin Waters and Pelican Waters combine house rents above $1,000 with modest taxable incomes, a signature of retiree wealth and business owners whose taxable income understates their means. Third, the eastern-Sydney cluster from Chifley to Matraville: six suburbs sharing one postcode income figure ($64,246) against $1,150-a-week unit rents. Note the postcode sharing; income is measured at postcode level, so neighbouring suburbs can share a figure (see methodology).

The 20 most comfortable

As predicted, mining and regional service towns dominate. Roxby Downs (Olympic Dam) and Dysart (Bowen Basin coal) pair six-figure local median incomes with cheap rents. The rest are regional towns where rents are simply low: Whyalla, Port Pirie, Broken Hill, Forbes. Two caveats worth naming. Where a suburb shows a large gap between a cheap unit median and a much dearer house median (Cheltenham and Sturt in Adelaide, for instance), the unit figure reflects a small stock of older flats; a new tenant should expect asking rents above the bond-derived median shown here. And we excluded one outright artefact: Moranbah's $100-a-week unit median reflects subsidised mining accommodation, not a market rent, so its market house median is used instead (see methodology).

City by city

Only three capitals can be measured (see methodology for why): Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Sydney: 0 of 601 suburbs affordable

Not one of Sydney's 601 qualifying suburbs is affordable to its own median earner. The least-severe corner of the city is the Blue Mountains and the far south-west fringe, and even there the local median earner is in rental stress.

The 10 least affordable:

The 10 closest to affordable:

Brisbane: 0 of 254 suburbs affordable

Brisbane matches Sydney's zero. The stressed band starts in Ipswich and the outer corridors, where Joyner (32%) and Raceview (33%) come closest to the benchmark.

The 10 least affordable:

The Sunnybank cluster and St Lucia repeat the CBD paradox in miniature: student-heavy taxpayer bases with median taxable incomes in the low $40,000s against rents set by the wider market.

The 10 closest to affordable:

Adelaide: 6 of 248 suburbs affordable (2.4%)

Adelaide is the only measured capital where any suburb clears the benchmark, and even here it is six suburbs out of 248. The affordable pockets are cheap-unit markets in the west, north and around Marion.

The 10 least affordable:

Hillcrest tops the list on a $940-a-week unit median that sits above its own house median, a signature of a small stock of newly built townhouse-style "units" rather than old flats. Its house-rent figure (72% of local net income) would still rank it among Adelaide's most stretched.

The 10 closest to affordable:

Read these unit medians with the house column in view: a $202-a-week unit median beside a $630-a-week house median (Cheltenham) describes a small stock of older flats whose sitting tenants pay well below what a new arrival would be asked.

The revealing middle

Two groups of suburbs tell the story better than the extremes.

Where high incomes narrow the gap but never close it. No suburb with top-quartile rent ($700 a week or more) is affordable to its own median earner. The closest are the suburbs where strong local incomes shrink the gap: Leichhardt, Lilyfield, Balmain, Cammeray and the Lane Cove suburbs in Sydney, and Bulimba in Brisbane, where local median taxable incomes of $83,000 to $92,000 still leave the median unit at 54% to 59% of net pay. Weipa's Rocky Point (54% on a $93,378 mining income) leads the list nationally. Even the strongest local income base in the country does not bring a $700-plus rent inside the benchmark for a single median earner.

Where modest rents still stress modest incomes. The reverse pattern is the quiet one: suburbs whose rents look cheap in a capital-city frame but whose local incomes are lower still. Bribie Island's Bellara, Moreton Bay's Macleay and Russell Islands, and the NSW retirement coast (Forster, Tuncurry, Laurieton, Ulladulla, Mollymook Beach) all pair sub-$500 rents with median taxable incomes near $45,000 or below, leaving the local median earner at 60% to 78% of net income. Affordability headlines that rank suburbs by rent alone miss every one of these.

What your salary rents, city by city

The local-gap analysis above asks what the median local earner can afford. This section asks the question the way Priced Out does, but at suburb level: on a given salary, what share of each capital's suburbs has a unit rent within 30% of your net income?

On $70,000 a year, a single renter can afford the median unit in zero Sydney suburbs, two Brisbane suburbs and ten Adelaide suburbs. Here they are.

Brisbane at $70,000: Raceview ($310/wk) and Joyner ($320/wk).

Adelaide at $70,000:

Methodology, honestly

What we measure (and what we don't)

Unit rent as the headline. Where a suburb has both a unit and a house rent median, the unit median is the headline figure because units are the cheaper dwelling type, which gives affordability its most charitable reading. If a suburb is unaffordable against unit rents, houses are worse. House rents are shown alongside wherever we hold them.

One earner, not one household. The ATO publishes individual taxable income, not household income, so the gap we measure is one median earner's income against one whole-dwelling rent. Dual-income households will find more suburbs affordable; the single-earner view shows the position facing sole earners, single parents and anyone whose partner does not work. It is deliberately conservative: a suburb that is affordable on one income is comfortable on two.

The multi-occupant reality. Suburbs like Haymarket, where the median taxable income is just over $40,000 and the unit median takes 172% of net pay, show what the data cannot capture directly: high-rent, low-income suburbs are sustained by sharers splitting tenancies, couples pooling incomes, and residents drawing on savings or family support. The gap does not mean nobody can live there. It means the typical individual earner cannot afford to live there alone, and that needing to combine resources is itself the affordability story, not a flaw in it.

What the rents are. Our rent medians come from state Valuers-General and bond-derived data: the rents tenants actually pay, recorded at suburb level per published quarter. This is a different measure from asking-rent indexes (SQM, Domain, CoreLogic and the rent series in campaign research), which capture what landlords currently seek. Actual rents run below asking rents in a rising market because sitting tenants hold older leases. Both are valid; they answer different questions. Ours answers "what do tenants in this suburb pay", not "what would you be asked tomorrow". Where a suburb's unit median sits far below its house median, expect the difference to be an older, smaller unit stock.

Coverage. We hold suburb-level rent medians for NSW (4,266 of 4,347 suburbs), Queensland (536, concentrated in the south-east and larger centres) and South Australia (948). Victoria, WA, Tasmania, the NT and the ACT publish no suburb-level rent medians in the sources we ingest, so Melbourne, Perth, Hobart, Darwin and Canberra are absent from this analysis. Queensland is covered on rents even though it publishes no suburb-level sale prices.

What the incomes are. Median taxable income per individual taxpayer from ATO Taxation Statistics, 2023-24 income year, published at postcode level and mapped to suburbs. Neighbouring suburbs sharing a postcode share an income figure. Taxable income is income after deductions and includes investment and business income; in retiree- and business-heavy areas it understates true means.

Net income conversion. We convert taxable income to take-home pay using the 2025-26 resident tax scale (0% to $18,200, 16% to $45,000, 30% to $135,000, 37% to $190,000, 45% above) plus the 2% Medicare levy. Not modelled: the low income tax offset, the Medicare levy low-income reduction, HELP repayments and the Medicare levy surcharge. Excluding the offsets slightly understates low earners' net income, which makes our stress figures marginally conservative in the other direction to the single-earner assumption. Incomes are 2023-24 (the latest published), tax rates are current; incomes will have grown somewhat since.

The benchmark. A suburb is Affordable when its annualised median rent is at or below 30% of the local median earner's net income, the standard Australian rental-stress threshold (the AHURI "30/40" convention). We classify 30% to 45% as Stressed and above 45% as Severe.

Floors and guards. Suburbs qualify with population of at least 2,000, at least one rent median, and an income row. Rents under $150 a week are treated as non-market stock and ignored (this removes exactly one figure: Moranbah's $100-a-week subsidised mining units; its $575 house median is used instead). 1,759 suburbs qualify: 962 in NSW, 505 in QLD, 292 in SA.

Correlation, not destiny. Suburb medians describe markets, not households. A suburb where the median earner is priced out still houses renters; they are sharers, couples, higher earners within the suburb, or people paying far more than 30%. Income and rent figures also come from different years and different collection systems, and postcode-level income smooths over real differences between adjacent suburbs. Treat individual rows as strong signals, not precision instruments. Every score and source is documented on our methodology page.

Sources: ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24 (postcode-level individual taxable income); state Valuers-General and bond-derived rent medians per published quarter; ABS Census 2021 populations; analysis SuburbCheck, August 2026.

This analysis extends, and is indebted to, the Priced Out research by Everybody's Home, which put rental affordability on the national agenda at the regional level. We present the suburb-level data and stop there; what should be done about it is a question for readers, researchers and campaigners.

Read next: Where Australia's Top Earners Really Live, the ATO tax-data view of income geography this analysis is built on. Australia's Highest-Earning Suburbs ranks the Census household-income view, and The School Premium tests what those income differences do to house prices.