Survey of Income and Housing results will not be released

Media Statement
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Released
17/07/2025
Release date and time
17/07/2025 11:30am AEST

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will not release statistics from the 2023-24 Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) due to data collection issues. Despite work to address these issues, the data did not meet the ABS’ high standards for official statistics and will not be released.

This decision means that the following products will not be released in 2025:

Deputy Australian Statistician, Dr Phillip Gould, said: ‘As the ABS modernises, we’re developing new ways to collect information to improve response rates and make it easier for people to complete our surveys.

‘This is partly because collecting data from households has become more difficult and costly in recent years. This is being experienced by statistical offices around the world.

‘While we were compiling the statistics for SIH 2023-24, we found serious shortcomings in the questionnaire design and data collection processes that we could not overcome, despite our best efforts.

‘Producing reliable statistics is our top priority and we will only release data we can stand by.’

The most recent SIH was in the field in the 2023-24 financial year. It collected detailed data on income, housing costs (like mortgages and rents), assets and liabilities (such as property, motor vehicles, investments and credit cards) from 30,000 households across Australia.

‘We acknowledge that this decision will impact those who rely on SIH statistics, and we’re working closely with key users to understand how we can best support their data needs,' Dr Gould said.

‘We also recognise the households that gave their information for the 2023-24 SIH. We’ve learned crucial lessons from this experience and have incorporated these lessons into our data collection for 2025-26 SIH, which is in the field now.’

Changes have been made to the questionnaire, collection and sample design. Extra user testing and quality checks have also been added to make sure 2025-26 SIH does not face similar issues to 2023-24 SIH.

Results from the SIH 2025-26 are expected to be published from mid-2027.

The ABS has a range of alternative data that give insights on income, wealth and housing, including:

Media notes:

  • The last data in the series is from 2019-20 SIH, available here. Collections in 2020-21 and 2021-22 were cancelled due to COVID-19.
  • When reporting ABS data you must attribute the Australian Bureau of Statistics (or the ABS) as the source.
  • For media requests and interviews, contact the ABS Media Team at media@abs.gov.au (9:00am-5:00pm Canberra time, Mon-Fri).
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