Digital boundary files

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 4

Date of publication: 22 July 2026
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

The Main Structure and Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA) of ASGS Edition 4 consists of the following geographies:

• Mesh Block (MB)
• Statistical Area Level 1 (SA1)
• Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2)
• Statistical Area Level 3 (SA3)
• Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4)
• Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA)
• State and Territory (S/T)
• Australia (AUS)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<2026>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

• <file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file
  • MB = Mesh Block
  • SA1 = Statistical Area Level 1
  • SA2 = Statistical Area Level 2
  • SA3 = Statistical Area Level 3
  • SA4 = Statistical Area Level 4
  • GCCSA = Greater Capital City Statistical Area
  • STE = State and Territory
  • AUS = Australia
• <2026> represents 2026 - the year of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 4
• <AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia
• <GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used, GDA2020.

Within the files, the States and Territories are identified by unique 1-digit codes.

Digital boundary attribute information

For each file, the following tables list:

• The name of each of the fields. This is dependent on the file type i.e. GeoPackage or ESRI Shapefile (Shapefile field names are restricted to 10 characters)
• The attribute data type. 
• The attribute field length. The length specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries.

Data currency

Date of effect: 22 July 2026

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: No further updates to the Main Structure and GCCSA boundaries are planned for Edition 4 (i.e. MB, SA1, SA2, SA3, SA4, STE, AUS, GCCSA). There will be progressive releases of other structures for ASGS Edition 4 until 2031 when the next edition of the ASGS is released.

Access

Stored data format: Digital as separate files for each level of the Main Structure and GCCSA of ASGS Edition 4.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage (.gpkg) and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum: Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)

Geographic extent: Geographic Australia

Extent - geographic bounding box:

• North bounding latitude: -8
• South bounding latitude: -45
• West bounding longitude: 96
• East bounding longitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Mesh Block (MB) boundaries were created using various public and commercial data sources. The ASGS is a cartographic representation of Australia for the purpose of representing statistics.

Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of the spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface. Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to a number of layers including Geoscape digital datasets. Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5cm with a 7.5cm shared boundary tolerance.

No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real-world feature.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115-1:2014 (including Amendment 1:2018), and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19115-3:2018.