Methodology

The headline overall score compares suburbs on the three metrics that use the same data sources at consistent quality across every state and territory— so the number means the same thing whether you're looking at a suburb in Perth or Parramatta:

• Transport — 35% (GTFS, all states)
• Liveability — 35% (OpenStreetMap + Bureau of Meteorology)
• Education — 30% (ACARA / ICSEA, national)

Residential safety is deliberately not part of the overall score.Crime data quality varies enormously by state — detailed suburb-level statistics in NSW, VIC, SA and the ACT; an LGA average in QLD; broad regional figures in WA and the NT; and nothing published below state level in Tasmania. Folding safety into the overall would make cross-state comparison unfair, because a suburb could score better simply because its state's crime data is coarser or missing. Instead, safety is shown as a separate, independent score wherever the data allows (see below).

The weights are the original transport 25% / liveability 25% / education 20% re-normalised over the three that remain. Property prices are shown throughout as factual information, but they do not contribute to any score.

Based on residentialcrime categories only, so commercial and transport-hub crime that doesn't affect residents is excluded. The weighted blend is: break & enter dwelling (35%), motor vehicle theft (20%), steal from dwelling (20%), domestic assault (15%), and robbery (10%).

The weighted residential crime rate per 100,000 residents is benchmarked against that state's medianon a logarithmic scale, so differences are meaningful at both the safe and high-crime ends of the spectrum. A suburb at its state median scores around 70. Each state's police agency counts offences differently (the median residential rate ranges from about 180 per 100k in NSW to nearly 500 in the NT), so benchmarking per state keeps the score comparable across the country.

Raw incident counts are always shown — they're facts, not rates. Below 500 residents (and for commercial / transport hubs whose incidents are dominated by non-residents) the per-resident rate and safety score are suppressed, because the denominator is too small to be meaningful; the raw counts still appear. Suburbs between 500 and 3,000 keep their rate and score but carry a volatility note (small samples swing year to year); commercial hubs also show an “area crime context” disclaimer.

A “commercial / transport hub” is identified from ABS Census Working Population Profile data: when the jobs located in an area (place of work) outnumber its working residents (place of usual residence) by 5 to 1 or more. CBDs run far higher — Sydney is about 25:1 — while residential and regional service towns sit near or below 1:1. This data-driven test replaced an earlier one based on crime rates, which mis-flagged regional towns that simply have higher recorded crime.

Tourist / visitor hubsget a different treatment. Crime is recorded by incident location, so beach and resort towns (Byron Bay and the like) accumulate offences involving their many visitors — fights, car break-ins at beach car parks, theft from holiday rentals — that inflate the per-resident rate even though resident risk is lower. We don't suppress these scores (the data is real), but where a suburb has a very high all-category crime rate and a visitor-servicing economy without being a commercial hub, we show a disclosure so the figures are read in context.

We first build a raw public-transport access measure for every suburb from:

• Train station proximity, on a distance-based gradient (a station in the suburb scores full marks; a station 1–5km away in a neighbouring suburb earns partial points rather than nothing)
• Metro station presence
• Light rail access
• Ferry access
• Peak service frequency
• Bus stop density
• Estimated public-transport commute time to the CBD

We then rank every suburb that has any public transport by this measure and convert the rank to a national percentile (0–100): the best-connected suburb in the country scores 100, the median transport-served suburb scores 50, and suburbs with no public transport score 0. Ranking nationally — rather than against a state median — is deliberate: most of Australia is rural with no services, so a state benchmark made every city suburb saturate at the top and stop differentiating. A percentile rank keeps inner-city, middle-suburban, outer-suburban and regional suburbs meaningfully apart, and means the transport score reflects genuine differences in service between cities (inner Sydney and Melbourne sit highest, then Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, then smaller cities such as Hobart).

The average ICSEA score of schools within 10km of the suburb centre(benchmarked against the national average of 1000), blended with the percentage of residents holding a bachelor's degree or higher. Schools are a drive-to amenity, so we use a wide 10km catchment — counting within a radius rather than the suburb boundary means a small suburb with no school of its own still gets credit for the schools its residents actually use. Schools are presented factually, never as a ranked league table.

A composite of amenity access within a short radius of the suburb centre(≈2–3km) — supermarkets, cafes & restaurants, parks, playgrounds, sports facilities, GPs and pharmacies — plus green-space access and climate comfort. We count within a radius, not the suburb boundary, so a small suburb is credited with the facilities just over its border that residents genuinely use. This means a suburb's liveability is partly shaped by its neighbours — which is how liveability actually works.

Amenity density also varies hugely by state, so — like transport and crime — the liveability score is benchmarked against the state median (median suburb ≈ 70). A rural Tasmanian suburb is judged against other Tasmanian suburbs, not against inner Sydney.