Greater Capital City Statistical Areas

Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA) are geographic areas built from Statistical Areas Level 4 (SA4). GCCSAs represent labour markets and the functional area of Australian capital cities respectively. GCCSAs were originally designed for ASGS Edition 1 (2011) with an emphasis on stability over time to support the time series of statistical releases, for example, the monthly Labour Force release.

There are 16 GCCSAs covering the whole of Australia without gaps or overlaps:

• Eight GCCSAs cover each of the Australian state and territory capital cities.
• Seven GCCSAs cover the rest of each state and the Northern Territory (ACT only has one GCCSA for the entire Territory).
• One GCCSA covers Other Territories which includes Jervis Bay, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Norfolk Island.

In addition to these 16 GCCSAs, there are 19 non-spatial special purpose codes, making a total of 35 GCCSAs. These non-spatial GCCSAs represent populations that are difficult to define geographically such as people who are in transit or have no fixed address. These special purpose codes include Migratory – Offshore – Shipping and No Usual Address for each state and territory, and the Outside Australia code.

GCCSAs may differ from official or commonly applied area boundaries.

GCCSAs are designed to represent the functional area of each of the 8 state and territory capital cities which includes populations who regularly socialise, shop or work within the city, but may live either in the city or in the small towns and rural areas surrounding the city. Within each state and territory, the area not included in the GCCSA is represented by a Rest of State region. GCCSAs do not have population criteria.

GCCSAs are named according to the cities they represent, for example “Greater Sydney”. The remainder of the state and territory is named Rest of <State>, for example “Rest of NSW”. The two exceptions to this are:

• the ACT, as the whole of the ACT is one GCCSA
• Other Territories, which do not have a capital city, are represented by one GCCSA.

A GCCSA is identified by a 5-character alphanumeric code. This comprises a 1-digit State and Territory identifier followed by a 4-character GCCSA identifier that is unique within each State and Territory.