Australian House Prices in 2026: A State-by-State Guide to What the Data Actually Says
Australian house prices in 2026, state by state
Every quarter the Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes the total value of the country's dwellings and a mean price for each state. The Reserve Bank publishes what households owe against those dwellings. Each state's Valuer-General publishes the settled sales that, rolled up, become a suburb's median. Shorted ingests all three and puts them on one housing tracker, and this is the picture they paint as at the March 2026 quarter, the latest the ABS has released.
The headline figures first, then each state, then what the numbers cannot tell you.
Which quarter, and how firm
Everything labelled "March 2026" below is the ABS March-quarter release, and the ABS flags it as preliminary. Preliminary quarters are routinely revised when the next release lands, usually by a fraction of a percentage point, occasionally by more. Lending and rents figures are June-quarter. The RBA cash rate is the end-of-August observation.
The national picture
| Measure | Value | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Total value of Australia's dwellings | $12.77 trillion | +11.9% over the year |
| Mean dwelling price | $1,111,100 | +2.0% in the quarter, +10.3% over the year |
| Household debt to income | 177.7% | roughly flat |
| Price-to-income index | 144.4 | +6.8% over the year |
| Rents index | +3.5% over the year | wages +3.2% |
| Investor share of new lending | 38.0% | June quarter |
| RBA cash rate target | 4.35% | 3.60% in January |
Two things stand out. The first is that dwelling values grew almost 12 per cent in a year while household debt to income barely moved, which means the gain accrued to equity rather than borrowing. Households' net worth reached $18.1 trillion, of which $12.3 trillion is housing. The second is that the price-to-income index rose 6.8 per cent in a year. Prices are running ahead of incomes again, and rents are running a touch ahead of wages.
The cash rate context matters for what comes next. The RBA series Shorted tracks shows the cash rate target at 3.60 per cent in January 2026 and 4.35 per cent from June. Higher rates have historically taken two to three quarters to show up in settled prices, so the March-quarter figures above mostly predate them. The economy pages carry the full series.
The capitals: a two-speed market
Median established-house prices by Greater Capital City area, March 2026 quarter:
| Capital | Median house | Quarter | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney | $1,485,000 | −4.8% | +2.4% |
| Canberra | $1,071,300 | +0.1% | +9.9% |
| Brisbane | $1,150,000 | +3.6% | +21.4% |
| Perth | $1,000,000 | +4.2% | +22.0% |
| Adelaide | $980,000 | +2.5% | +15.0% |
| Melbourne | $850,000 | −4.7% | +1.8% |
| Darwin | $750,000 | +5.6% | +25.0% |
| Hobart | $740,000 | −1.3% | +3.5% |
Sydney and Melbourne, the two markets that dominate the national dollar figures, both fell close to 5 per cent in the quarter and are up less than 2.5 per cent for the year. Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin are up between 15 and 25 per cent. Perth's median house crossed $1 million for the first time in this series.
Units tell the same story more sharply. Melbourne's median attached dwelling fell 8.2 per cent in the quarter to $615,000 and is down 2.1 per cent over the year, the only capital going backwards. Perth units are up 27.8 per cent, Brisbane units 21.8 per cent.
The capital city pages carry each of these as a full quarterly series back to the start of the ABS data.
State by state
The ABS mean price covers all dwellings in the state, houses and units, capital and regional. The regional medians are the ABS "rest of state" established-house figures.
New South Wales
Mean dwelling price $1,324,800, up 6.1 per cent over the year and just 0.4 per cent in the quarter. NSW dwellings are worth $4.69 trillion, 37 per cent of the national total. Regional NSW houses ($825,000, +8.3 per cent) outpaced Sydney (+2.4 per cent) over the year. NSW has the country's highest investor share of new lending at 42 per cent, and investor commitments fell 14 per cent in the June quarter.
Shorted carries a Valuer-General median for 2,433 NSW suburbs. Browse them on the NSW suburb map, or start with the most expensive and cheapest rankings.
Victoria
Mean dwelling price $947,100, up 4.1 per cent over the year and down 0.3 per cent in the quarter, the only state to fall. Melbourne houses ($850,000) are now cheaper than Brisbane, Perth and Canberra houses, which was not true five years ago. Regional Victoria ($625,000, +8.7 per cent) again did better than the capital. Victoria also has the highest rate of asking-price cuts in the listings Shorted tracks, covered in a separate piece.
The Victorian suburb map and the fastest-growing Victorian suburbs ranking use Valuer-General medians to the December 2025 quarter.
Queensland
Mean dwelling price $1,123,700, up 17.3 per cent over the year and 4.6 per cent in the quarter. Queensland's dwelling stock is now worth $2.60 trillion, closing on Victoria's $2.87 trillion. Brisbane houses gained 21.4 per cent; regional Queensland ($815,000) gained 14.8 per cent.
Queensland does not publish an open Valuer-General sales feed, so Queensland suburb pages carry Census demographics, amenities, electorates and hazard exposure but no official suburb median. Where the listings crawl covers a suburb, an indicative asking-price figure appears instead, clearly labelled.
Western Australia
Mean dwelling price $1,103,500, up 25.4 per cent over the year and 7.2 per cent in the quarter, the fastest growth in the country on both horizons. Perth houses reached $1,000,000; Perth units rose 27.8 per cent; regional WA houses rose 22.4 per cent. WA's stock is worth $1.32 trillion, up 27 per cent in a year. As in Queensland, there is no open sales feed, so the WA suburb pages are demographic profiles rather than price series.
South Australia
Mean dwelling price $973,100, up 15.1 per cent over the year. Adelaide houses gained 15.0 per cent to $980,000 and regional SA houses gained 22.7 per cent to $595,000. South Australia publishes Valuer-General sales, so the SA suburb map carries medians for 426 suburbs and has fastest-growing and cheapest rankings.
Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory
Tasmania's mean price is $750,300, up 11.0 per cent, though Hobart houses grew only 3.5 per cent and units did the heavy lifting at 11.3 per cent. The ACT sits at $1,018,000, up 8.4 per cent, with Canberra houses at $1,071,300. The Northern Territory grew 18.9 per cent to a mean of $597,300, with Darwin houses up 25 per cent to $750,000 from a low base.
What the numbers cannot tell you
A mean is not a median. The ABS state figure is a mean across all dwellings, pulled upward by expensive stock. The capital-city house figures are medians. Comparing the two across a table is comparing two different things, which is why the tables above keep them apart.
A suburb median is a rolling window of settled sales. A suburb that settled forty sales last quarter has a firm median; one that settled six does not. Shorted's suburb pages show the observation window and rank each suburb only against others in the same state that carry the metric, never nationally, because each Valuer-General counts differently.
Preliminary means preliminary. The March-quarter capital figures will be revised. Treat a 0.1 per cent quarterly move (Canberra) as noise and a 4.8 per cent one (Sydney) as a signal that may shrink in the next release.
Three states have no open price feed. Queensland, Western Australia and the territories sell sales data through brokers. Shorted will not republish crawled portal data as if it were an official median, so those suburbs carry demographics and labelled listing indicators only. The gap is a licensing fact, not a data-quality one.
Where to go from here
Start at the national tracker for the ABS and RBA series, drill into a state map coloured by median price, Census income, SEIFA decile, crime rank or hazard share, then open a suburb profile and check it against its neighbours. The calculators turn a median into a repayment, a stamp duty bill and a rent-versus-buy comparison, and the price-drops board shows where sellers are already discounting.
Sources: ABS Total Value of Dwellings and Residential Property Price releases (March quarter 2026, preliminary), ABS Lending Indicators (June quarter 2026), ABS Wage Price Index and Consumer Price Index rents (June quarter 2026), RBA household finances and cash rate target series, state Valuer-General open data for suburb medians. ABS and RBA data are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Figures are descriptive, not forecasts, and nothing here is financial advice.
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