Where Australia's Top Earners Really Live: What the Tax Data Shows

Every time the ATO's tax statistics come out, the same headlines follow: the top 1%, the richest postcodes, the harbourside averages. Most of that coverage sits behind paywalls, and almost all of it quotes one number, the average, which happens to be the most misleading number in the whole dataset.

We've now loaded the ATO's postcode-level tax data (2023-24 income year, the newest release, covering every individual tax return in the country) into SuburbCheck. So here's the free national picture: which postcodes really top the tables, state by state, every suburb linked to its full profile. And alongside it, the number the headlines don't show you: the gap between the average earner and the typical one. That gap turns out to be the real story.

Average vs median, in one pub

If a billionaire walks into a pub, the average patron becomes a millionaire, but the typical patron hasn't gained a cent. That's the whole trick. The average (mean) taxable income adds everyone up and divides; a few enormous incomes drag it skyward. The median is the person in the middle: half earn more, half earn less.

So for every postcode we compute the gap ratio: average ÷ median. Nationally the typical postcode sits at about 1.2×. Where the ratio blows out to 3× or 4×, you've found a place where a small cluster of very high incomes lives alongside a much more ordinary majority. Only 43 of Australia's 2,261 substantial postcodes have a ratio of 2× or more, and the chart above shows the ten most extreme. That short list, not the averages table, is where Australia's serious wealth actually announces itself.

The top 25 postcodes by average taxable income

Ranks are the ATO's own national ranks. We include postcodes with at least 200 taxpayers; the few missing rank numbers (including rank 1) belong to tiny or non-residential postcodes: PO-box and business codes with no suburb to link to. Even the ATO's own headline table excludes them, and its list starts where ours does: Portsea.

Notice the medians. In not one of these 25 postcodes does the typical taxpayer crack $95,000. Every median here sits within striking distance of an ordinary professional salary, and Australia-wide the median taxpayer earns just under $60,000. The averages are two to four times higher. That difference is the concentration of wealth, and it deserves its own table.

The concentration story: Australia's most top-heavy postcodes

The 15 largest average-to-median gaps in the country (same 200-taxpayer floor):

Start with Portsea. Its average of $321,988, the top of the ATO's headline list, is 4.2 times its median of $75,808. The typical Portsea taxpayer wouldn't crack the median list of a good Canberra postcode. What Portsea actually contains is a small permanent population of ordinary earners and retirees, plus a thin layer of extraordinarily large incomes: investment returns, capital gains and business profits attached to holiday-home owners who call their beach house home for tax purposes. The average describes the money; the median describes the residents.

The pattern repeats down the whole table, and the geography is striking: six of the fifteen are on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula (Portsea, Flinders, Main Ridge, Red Hill, Sorrento, plus Gippsland's coastal Woodside). These aren't commuter suburbs; they're where Melbourne's money holidays. Sydney's versions are Palm Beach and semi-rural Bayview on the northern beaches. Toorak and Bellevue Hill are the classic old-money residential cases. Perth contributes its river-mouth trio. Almost none of this is salary; salaries simply don't reach $300K *on average* anywhere. It's what accumulated capital earns.

The inverse cases are just as telling. Sixteen substantial postcodes have an average below their median: a bottom-heavy income distribution. They're of two kinds. Grain-belt farm postcodes like Thallon (4497, average $31,079 vs median $44,778) and Dirranbandi (4486): farm businesses running losses drag the average below what the typical wage-earner in town makes. (Tiny Mungallala's postcode 4467, below our floor at 115 taxpayers, is the national extreme: average $17,164 against a median of $35,107.) And then, remarkably, the Pilbara: Pannawonica and Paraburdoo both post ratios of 0.9, as does the army-base postcode of Puckapunyal. When nearly everyone in town earns the same high structured wage and heavy deductions trim the top, the distribution flips: high floor, no tower.

The top five in every state

New South Wales: the eastern-suburbs quartet plus Hunters Hill, exactly where a century of Sydney money says they should be.

Victoria: the only state whose list is topped by a holiday postcode rather than a residential one.

Queensland: acreage Chandler leads, then the riverside inner-east.

Western Australia: five contiguous postcodes along the river and coast west of Perth.

South Australia: foothills and inner-ring gentility, gate-crashed at number 4 by the mining town of Roxby Downs, whose 1.0× ratio marks it as the only postcode here where the average earner *is* the typical earner.

Tasmania: vineyard-belt Relbia outside Launceston edges out Hobart's Sandy Bay.

ACT: Canberra's inner south, with the highest medians of any capital and the gentlest gap ratios: high, *even* incomes.

Northern Territory: a mining island, an air-force base, and Darwin's harbour suburbs.

Where the typical earner does best

Flip the sort to the median, the middle taxpayer, and the map redraws itself completely:

Not a single harbourside postcode. Thirteen of the fifteen are mining towns, in the Pilbara iron-ore belt and Queensland's Bowen Basin, where the *typical* taxpayer out-earns the typical taxpayer of Toorak by $50,000 a year. The two exceptions are instructive: Erskineville, the highest median in urban Australia (young, dense, near-universal white-collar employment, few retirees to pull the median down), and Canberra's Griffith–Red Hill, the only postcode in the country to crack both the average AND median top-15s. The mean list shows where wealth lives; the median list shows where work pays.

How this squares with the household income rankings

Last week we ranked Australia's highest-earning suburbs using Census household income, where Sydney's Lane Cove peninsula topped the country. The two lists measure different things and disagree in revealing ways. Census medians count whole households (two professional salaries stacked together) and are self-reported for 2021. The ATO data counts individual taxpayers, includes investment income and capital gains, nets off deductions, and is two years fresher. Northwood's dual-income families win the household contest; Portsea's capital wins the individual-average contest; the Pilbara's wages win the median contest. All three are true. Together they're a much better answer to "where do the rich live?" than any single number, and a caution against reading too much into whichever one a headline happens to quote.

Methodology

Source: ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24, Individuals Table 7D (returns processed to 31 October 2025), the newest available suburb-adjacent income data. Figures are postcode-level: a postcode often spans several suburbs of very different character, so we name and link the largest ones. Taxable income is income after deductions: it includes salaries, investment income, rental income, capital gains and business profits, and is not the same as a wage. Tables cover the 2,261 postcodes with at least 200 taxpayers (of 2,553 that map to residential suburbs); smaller and non-residential postcodes are excluded, as are postcodes the ATO suppresses for privacy. Gap ratio = average ÷ median taxable income.

One honesty note: the ATO's postcode release publishes averages and medians, not income distributions, so unlike some recent coverage we can't and don't compute "top 1% threshold" figures for a postcode. The average-to-median gap is what the released data genuinely supports, and it tells the concentration story more honestly than a single average ever can. Full details on every figure we publish: methodology.

Read next: Australia's Highest-Earning Suburbs, the Census household-income view of the same question, covering every state. And for where that wealth clustering shows up on the ground: The School Premium tests what top schools really add to suburb prices, and The Rent Gap turns this tax data on the rental market, asking whether each suburb's median earner can afford its median rent. What a $125,000 Income Can Actually Buy in Australia does the same for buying, using the borrowing capacity in the realestate.com.au Housing Affordability Report 2026.