The 30% rule is the standard measure of rental stress in Australia: if rent eats more than 30% of your gross income, you're stretched. Run that rule backwards and you get a more useful number — the salary each city quietly requires before you can rent there comfortably. We computed it for every capital, from all 15,281 suburbs in our dataset.
The income each capital asks for
| Capital | Median rent (25 km) | Income needed (30% rule) | Cheapest suburb entry point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney | $805/wk | $140,000 | Riverwood — $485/wk (~$84,000) |
| Brisbane | $720/wk | $125,000 | Riverview — $485/wk (~$84,000) |
| Perth | $680/wk | $118,000 | Willagee — $515/wk (~$89,000) |
| Canberra | $660/wk | $114,000 | Rivett — $470/wk (~$81,000) |
| Melbourne | $600/wk | $104,000 | Dallas — $475/wk (~$82,000) |
| Adelaide | $595/wk | $103,000 | Christie Downs — $420/wk (~$73,000) |
| Hobart | $587/wk | $102,000 | Bridgewater — $390/wk (~$68,000) |
| Darwin | $500/wk | $87,000 | Karama — $410/wk (~$71,000) |
Median rent is the median of suburb median rents within 25 km of each CBD (suburbs with 3,000+ residents). For context, the same calculation across every Australian suburb — capitals and regions together — lands at $640/wk, or about $111,000 a year.
These numbers went up sharply in July 2026 — because we were wrong before, not because the market moved. Our rents used to be built from 2021 Census medians, which count every sitting tenancy including long-held cheap leases. We now check them against the official measure — the median of newly lodged rental bonds — and ours were running 47% low. The table below is the corrected one. The full account is in the caveats.
What jumps out
- The Sydney premium is a salary of its own. Renting a median Sydney suburb without stress takes $140,000 — $53,000 a year more than Darwin, $37,000 more than Adelaide. Same 30% rule, wildly different pay-cheque.
- The sub-$70,000 doorway has essentially closed. Last time we ran this, every capital had a suburb you could rent comfortably on under $70,000. On corrected numbers, exactly one does: Hobart, via Bridgewater at $390/wk (~$68,000). In Sydney and Brisbane the cheapest suburb of any size now asks about $84,000 — more than the old table claimed the median Sydney suburb required.
- No capital's median clears $87,000. Darwin is the cheapest place in Australia to rent a median suburb, and it still wants $87,000 a year to do it without tipping into rental stress. The "affordable capital" is a comparative term now, not an absolute one.
- Canberra's bargain has come home. On price, the ACT's best value is still across the border — see our cheapest-suburbs analysis. On rent it no longer is: Rivett, inside the ACT, is now the cheapest entry at $470/wk. Queanbeyan's rents corrected upward far more than its prices did, which is what you'd expect of a town whose rental market answers to Canberra.
The honest caveats
These are modelled medians, not live rental listings — the true asking rent for a specific home will differ. And this table has now audited our own data twice. The first time, a $205/wk median in inner-west Sydney gave away a bug where suburbs sharing a name across states inherited each other's Census rents (Croydon NSW was wearing outback-Queensland Croydon's rent).
The second time was worse, and worth stating plainly: every rent on this site was about 47% too low. Two faults compounded. Our figures were built from 2021 Census medians, which measure every sitting tenancy — including leases signed years ago and never re-let — rather than what a new lease costs. And we measured each suburb's distance to its state capital, so Burleigh Waters was priced as an hour from Brisbane instead of five minutes from the Gold Coast. We now hold 7,823 real bond-lodgement medians from the NSW, QLD and VIC governments, and checking our numbers against them made both faults obvious. Rents are now calibrated against that data: across the ~2,900 suburbs where we can check, we sit 2.6% below the official median with a typical error under 10%, against 47% before.
Two things we won't paper over. Only NSW, QLD and VIC publish open bond data, so Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin are corrected using the pattern fitted from the eastern states — a reasonable assumption, but an assumption. And the same correction has not been applied to our prices, which share the underlying distance fault: now that the rents are right, they imply our prices are too low. We would rather tell you that than quietly ship a yield figure we don't believe. Transparency means showing you the seams.
Where these figures come from
Recomputed on 16 July 2026 from this site's open suburb dataset (ABS 2021 Census rent and income data, calibrated against government rental-bond lodgements — full detail on the methodology page). Every capital uses the same method, which is why the table uses our calibrated figures throughout rather than mixing real bond medians for the eastern capitals with modelled ones for the rest — comparing a bond median against a modelled one would tell you more about the two methods than about the two cities. Income figures use the 30% gross-income housing-stress threshold: weekly rent × 52 ÷ 0.30, rounded to the nearest $1,000. The dataset refreshes monthly, so the calculators are always more current than this article.