About Live in Sydney
An independent project that turns the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ own figures into a plain-language read on every Greater Sydney suburb. It has no property listings and doesn’t rank individual schools — just the public data, explained.
Who's behind it
Live in Sydney is built and maintained by Kenneth Au, who lives in Sydney. It started as a way to answer the questions people actually ask when weighing up a suburb — is it growing, what does it cost, who would the neighbours be — from the source data rather than sales material.
It is a one-person project. If something looks wrong, or a figure is out of date, tell me and I’ll fix it.
Why you can trust the numbers
Every figure on the site is a published open dataset, credited on the page it appears on. Nothing is modelled, estimated or filled in: when a suburb is missing a dataset, that section of its page is hidden rather than shown with a placeholder.
Every chart is paired with a plain-language summary sentence and a collapsible data table, so the underlying numbers are always legible — not just the picture. Vintages differ by dataset (population is annual, the Census and SEIFA are five-yearly), and each page shows the date its figures are current to.
Where the figures come from
| Source | Publisher | Licence | Cadence | What’s shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ABS Regional Population | Australian Bureau of Statistics | CC BY 4.0 | Annual | Estimated resident population, Annual growth rate, Internal and overseas migration |
| ABS Census of Population and Housing (2021) 2016 comparison figures are mapped onto 2021 SA2 boundaries via the ABS Time Series Profile, so they're approximate wherever a boundary changed. Household composition, country of birth and language figures are benchmarked against a NSW-wide average from the same DataPack at state level. | Australian Bureau of Statistics | CC BY 4.0 | Five-yearly | Income, Rent and mortgage, Tenure, Dwelling structure, Employment, Year 12 attainment, Household composition (couple family, one-parent family, lone person, group household), Country of birth (top 5) and language used at home (top 5) |
| ABS SEIFA 2021 | Australian Bureau of Statistics | CC BY 4.0 | Five-yearly | Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage, Index of Relative Socio-economic Advantage and Disadvantage, Index of Economic Resources, Index of Education and Occupation |
| ABS Consumer Price Index Published for whole capital cities, not suburbs — "cost of living" figures cover Sydney as a whole. | Australian Bureau of Statistics | CC BY 4.0 | Quarterly | Headline CPI, The 11 CPI groups, ~31 expenditure classes, Quarterly and annual % change |
| DCJ median weekly rents DCJ reports by postcode, matched to ABS SA2 suburbs by postcode — several suburbs sharing one postcode share its figures. A suppressed postcode falls back to the Greater Sydney median. | NSW Department of Communities and Justice | CC BY 4.0 | Quarterly | Median weekly rent by dwelling type and bedroom count, New bonds lodged (sample size) |
| DCJ median sale prices DCJ reports by postcode, matched to ABS SA2 suburbs by postcode — several suburbs sharing one postcode share its figures. A suppressed postcode falls back to the Greater Sydney median. Coarser than a per-property sale price: the NSW Valuer General's bulk Property Sales Information has SA2-level precision but is licensed CC BY-NC-ND, which blocks publishing computed medians on an ad-supported site — this DCJ figure is the licence-clear substitute. | NSW Department of Communities and Justice | CC BY 4.0 | Quarterly (lags the rent report by roughly a quarter) | Median sale price by dwelling type (house/non-strata, unit/strata), Sales count (sample size) |
| ACARA Schools NSW | NSW Department of Education / ACARA | CC BY 4.0 | ~Yearly | Sector (government / non-government), School type and year levels, Enrolment, Location |
| NSW school intake zones (catchment areas) Matched to ACARA Schools NSW by a DoE-to-ACARA id crosswalk. Catchments are 'primary' or 'secondary' only — unlike some other states, NSW doesn't split secondary catchments into junior/senior. | NSW Department of Education | CC BY 4.0 | ~Yearly | Government-school enrolment catchment boundaries, Which state school an SA2 is zoned for |
| ACARA School Profile (ICSEA) ACARA doesn't publish a stated open licence for this spreadsheet — this is the freely available subset. NAPLAN results aren't included; the site links out to My School for those, and never builds a school-by-school league table. | ACARA | No stated open licence | Yearly | ICSEA, Socio-educational-advantage quarters, Enrolment and student-diversity figures |
| NSW SES Georges River flood database Covers the Georges River catchment only (southern/south-western Sydney) — no equivalent public layer exists for Sydney's other catchments. All three layers are modelled extents, not historic flood events. Extent polygons aren't clipped to any boundary, so we lay a ~40m grid over each suburb and sample it — an approximation, not a per-property lookup. NSW SES's item metadata states no explicit reuse licence (only an attribution line), so none is claimed here. | NSW State Emergency Service | No stated open licence | Rare — re-run when NSW SES republishes the layers | 1% AEP (1-in-100-year) modelled flood extent, Broader flood-potential extent, Probable Maximum Flood (worst-case) extent |
| OpenStreetMap amenities and map tiles | OpenStreetMap contributors | ODbL | As OSM contributors update it | Health and transport amenity counts, The suburb boundary map tiles |
| Not yet covered: HTAG property price estimates | Quarterly (planned) | |||
| Not yet covered: Transport for NSW public-transport timetables | Not yet ingested | |||
Also not yet covered: NBN availability and DA (development-application) data. Named here rather than left out, so it’s clear what the site does and doesn’t include today.
How often it updates
Data is ingested on a schedule by automated jobs, never live. The ABS releases that feed the site are quarterly or annual, so the site is refreshed on that cadence rather than continuously. The most recent refresh was 25 September 2026.
Because freshness matters more than immediacy here, every suburb, ranking and cost-of-living page carries a “figures current to” line so you can see exactly how old the numbers are. Here is when each source was last refreshed:
- ABS Census of Population and Housing (2021)
- 23 September 2026
- ABS Consumer Price Index
- 23 September 2026
- ABS Regional Population
- 25 September 2026
- ABS SEIFA 2021
- 23 September 2026
- ACARA School Profile (ICSEA)
- 23 September 2026
- ACARA Schools NSW
- 23 September 2026
- DCJ median sale prices
- 24 September 2026
- DCJ median weekly rents
- 24 September 2026
- NSW school intake zones (catchment areas)
- 23 September 2026
- NSW SES Georges River flood database
- 23 September 2026
- OpenStreetMap amenities and map tiles
- 23 September 2026
Limitations
Some of the site’s figures are exact matches to a suburb; others are the closest honest approximation the underlying data allows. Both kinds are shown — the difference is stated, not hidden:
- 2016 “then and now” comparisons are mapped onto 2021 SA2 boundaries via the ABS Time Series Profile, so they’re approximate wherever a boundary changed between Censuses.
- Reported-offence data (NSW BOCSAR) is published by locality name, not by ABS SA2 — we match localities to suburbs and only show a figure where that match is unambiguous, so some suburbs (mostly where one gazetted locality splits into several SA2s) have no crime section.
- Flood-risk data (NSW SES) covers the Georges River catchment only — roughly a quarter of Sydney’s suburbs, concentrated in the south and south-west. Its extent polygons aren’t clipped to any boundary, so we lay a grid over each suburb and sample it — an approximation, not a per-property lookup.
- Park locations and TAFE/vocational data aren’t ingested yet.
- HTAG property price estimates, NBN availability and development-application (DA) data aren’t ingested yet.
Licensing & independence
ABS data is used under CC BY 4.0; NSW Government school data (ACARA Schools NSW, NSW Department of Education catchments), NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) reported-offence data and NSW State Emergency Service flood data under CC BY 4.0 where published, otherwise attributed without a claimed licence; OpenStreetMap data under the ODbL. Live in Sydney is an independent project and is not affiliated with the ABS, ACARA, the NSW Government, BOCSAR or the NSW State Emergency Service.
Contact
Questions, corrections or a suburb you’d like covered: use the contact form.