Student accommodation in Australia

The number of international students studying in Australia has more than tripled over the past 20 years, increasing from 182,137 in June 2004 to 566,006 by June 2024. According to the Department of Education, international student enrolments in Australia rose by 15% in 2024 compared to 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With borders reopening post-COVID, there has been renewed interest in expanding accommodation options to meet the growing demand from international students attending university. This article provides estimates of building approvals for certain types of student accommodation, not currently available within the standard Building Approvals, Australia publication. For the purposes of this article, student accommodation will be broadly defined as buildings primarily providing sleeping/living facilities to university students. 

Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) is student accommodation built for the purpose of providing sleeping quarters for students. These types of buildings are captured within the ABS’ Building Approvals publication as non-residential building jobs because they are not classified as a residential building job using the Functional Classification of Buildings (FCB). Under the FCB, a building is only considered residential if it is “intended for long-term residential use, possessing cooking and bathing/showering facilities”. PBSA jobs are not intended for long-term accommodation, and accordingly do not meet the definition of a residential building. Accordingly, there is no associated count of dwellings for PBSA captured within the Building Approvals publication. Likewise, PBSA does not have a unique and distinct category for which building value estimates are published; instead, the value of a PBSA job contributes to the higher level aggregate non-residential series along with other non-residential building jobs. This makes understanding the size or potential growth of PBSA not readily available from the Building Approvals publication. This treatment is consistent with Census, where student accommodation is categorised as a type of non-private dwelling. 

This article presents estimates of student accommodation that are captured within the ABS Building Approvals publication. For the purposes of this article, the ABS defines student accommodation as buildings primarily providing sleeping/living facilities for university students. Building approvals are manually assessed and classified as buildings that could potentially be student accommodation. Examples of these types of buildings include both building jobs in which students have their own room with shared kitchen/living areas, as well as private studios where some of the leisure facilities are shared.  The counts in this article refer to the number of rooms, based on the intended number of individuals a PBSA building job is designed to accommodate (often referred to as PBSA beds). All counts in the article are estimates based on identifying which non-residential jobs are PBSA, and then using a range of data sources to determine an accurate estimate of the number of beds within each PBSA job. For an in-depth explanation on how records are sourced, please refer to the Methodology section.

Since the estimates are sourced from building approval records, this publication captures PBSA jobs that are highly likely to commence and have been completed. This article does not include any broad intentions or plans to build PBSA, such as jobs that have obtained early planning approvals but not yet proceeded to obtaining a building approval. Jobs that have proceeded to the stage of receiving a building approval are much more likely to be commenced and thus completed. Future analysis could extend this article to include more information on PBSA commencements and completions. 

Between the 2021/22 and 2023/24 financial years, a total of 9,759 student accommodation rooms were approved for construction across Australia. 

The previous two years have seen a steady rise in PBSA approvals, increasing from 1,684 rooms in 2021/22 to 2,897 in 2022/23, and then jumping to 5,178 in 2023/24. This year-on-year growth coincides with the reopening of international borders post-pandemic and the increase in international student numbers, as reflected in student visa data from the Department of Home Affairs.

Over the three financial years, NSW had the largest share of approvals for student accommodation, accounting for 49.1% of all approved rooms in the country (4,791 rooms). The majority share of approvals aligns alongside Department of Education data showing that 38% of all international students chose to study in NSW between January and August 2024.

Other significant contributors to student accommodation rooms were Victoria 1,735 (17.8%) and Western Australia 1,706 (17.5%).

While NSW remains the main driver for student accommodation developments, the breakdown by state and financial year highlights recent growth in other states as well. Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia all recorded significant increases in student accommodation approvals from 2022/23 to 2023/24. These states were the main driver of the overall increase in 2023/24.

LGA breakdowns for NSW and Victoria highlight key areas where student accommodation is approved. In NSW, the majority of approvals between 2021/22 and 2023/24 were in Randwick (2,264 rooms) and the City of Sydney (1,304 rooms). In Victoria, most student accommodation rooms were approved in the City of Melbourne (1,135 rooms), over the same time period.

The estimates presented in this article are based on building approvals, while planning approvals which occurs in the earlier stages of a PBSA job are not considered. Most projects that advance to the stage of receiving a building approval will eventually proceed to a building commencement, and be in scope of the ABS Building Activity survey. This means that the estimates published in this article are likely to be lower than other publications which examine early-stage planning approvals where the authority to proceed to construction is not yet given.

In future, it may be possible to link the student accommodation approvals presented in this article to the Building Activity survey. This would provide information on purpose built student accommodation commencements, work done, and building completions. An assessment is still required in order to determine the feasibility of producing these outputs, as Building Activity is a sample survey (unlike Building Approvals which is an administrative collection of all approvals).

The primary source of student accommodation data is the data used in the Building Approvals publication by the ABS. For this analysis, student accommodation is defined as buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for university students. The counts provided by the ABS represent the total number of student accommodation rooms approved, including:

• Units that are fully self-contained (with individual shower and cooking facilities).
• Rooms with shared facilities, where the count reflects the intended number of students (e.g., five bedrooms connected to shared facilities count as five student accommodation rooms).

Student accommodation for high school students, such as boarding schools, are excluded.

Building Approvals operate under the ABS-owned Functional Classification of Buildings (FCB) for classifying building jobs. The following summarises how building jobs are classified:

•              Type of work: Jobs can either be new or alteration and addition. Alterations or additions are when an existing building is modified in some way. This article focuses on new student accommodation work (i.e. construction of a new building).

•              Type of Building: Jobs are classified as either residential or non-residential. 

a.            Residential jobs are defined as a building that contains one or more dwellings. Dwellings are defined as a suite of rooms contained within a building and containing cooking and bathing/showering facilities, intended for the provision of long-term accommodation.

b.            Student accommodation is defined as non-residential as it is not intended for the provision of long-term accommodation. This is consistent with the classification used to classify dwellings in the Census where student accommodation is classified as a Non-Private Dwelling.

•              Functional Classification of Buildings: Student accommodation comes under one of two non-residential FCB classifications:

a.            FCB 411 Education buildings: This is typically used when the student accommodation is owned by the university.

b.            FCB 462 Hotels, motels, boarding houses or lodges: This is typically used for student accommodation owned and managed independent of the university (such as a residential college).

To capture all student accommodation in Australia, the ABS examined each building approval record that fell into one of the following categories:

1. Records with an FCB build code of 411 or 462.
2. Checked any record with the term ‘student’ in the free text field.
3. Checked any record with an owner known to be a provider of student accommodation.

The majority of student accommodation would be classified with an FCB build code of 411 or 462, however the latter two approaches to data collection were used to ensure an exhaustive list of potential student accommodation was assessed.

While the data for this feature article has been primarily collected from individual building approvals, additional information has been sourced from third parties, such as media articles and publicly available information, to estimate the number of ‘rooms’ associated with each project where this was not provided to the ABS.