Labour Force Status of Families

Latest release

Family level labour force status estimates, including the number and type of families with one or two employed parents, and jobless families

Cite
Print
Reference period
June 2025
Release date and time
23/09/2025 11:30am AEST

Key statistics

In June 2025:

  • There were 7.7 million families, an increase of over 1.0 million since June 2015.
  • There were 1.4 million jobless families, which represents 18.5% of all families.
  • 271,000 one parent families were jobless.
  • Almost three-quarters (73%) of the 2.2 million couple families with children aged 0-14 years had two employed parents.

What is a family?

A family is defined as two or more related people who live in the same household, such as couples with or without children (including same sex couples), couples with dependants, single parents, and siblings living together. At least one person in the family must be 15 years or over. 

A household is one or more people usually resident in the same private dwelling. It may contain a single family, multiple families, or unrelated people. The main differences between estimates for households and estimates for families are that multi-family households are split into their component family units (couple families, one parent families or other families) and households without families (group households and people living alone) are not included in families estimates.

Families can be classed as having, or not having, dependants. There are two kinds of dependants:

  • children under 15 years
  • dependent students aged 15 to 24 years who are attending school or studying full-time at a tertiary education institution and living with their parents/guardians

See the Labour Force Status of Families methodology for more information.

Flowchart of main family types

All families

In June 2025 there were 7.7 million families. Of these:

  • 6.4 million (82%) were couple families
  • 1.2 million (16%) were one parent families - with 77% of these having single mothers
  • 138,000 (2%) were classified as 'other families', where at least two people were related in some way other than as a couple or as a parent and child (such as adult-age siblings)

There were 3.4 million families with children or dependants, of which 80% had children aged 0-14 years.

Jobless families

A jobless family is defined as a family where each family member aged over 15 years was unemployed, retired or otherwise not in the labour force. While the family may be 'jobless', as there can be more than one family in a household, there may be families that are jobless but living in a household with someone employed.

In June 2025, there were 1.4 million jobless families (18.5% of all families). Of these:

  • The majority (almost 1.2 million) were families without dependants (which includes retirees)
  • 233,000 had dependants (down from 252,000 in June 2024), representing almost 7% of all families with dependants

Around 3% of couple families with dependants, and 22% of one parent families with dependants were jobless. Of all families with children under 15, 7% were jobless.

There were 394,000 children aged 0-14 years who were living in jobless families (down from 425,000 in June 2024).

Jobless couple families with dependants

There were 69,000 jobless couple families with dependants (3% of all couple families with dependants) in June 2025. This was down from 75,000 jobless couple families with dependants in June 2024.

In June 2025, 58,000 of jobless couple families had children aged 0-14. This included 121,000 children aged 0-14 years in these families.

Jobless one parent families with dependants

There were 164,000 jobless one parent families with dependants in June 2025 (22% of one parent families with dependants). This was down from 176,000 (24% of one parent families with dependants) in June 2024.

In June 2025, 51% of jobless one parent families had children under 15. This included 273,000 children aged 0-14 years in these families.

Jobless families without dependants

In June 2025 there were almost 1.2 million jobless families without dependants, which represented 28% of all families without dependants. Of all jobless families without dependants:

  • 1.0 million (89%) were couple families
  • 107,000 (9%) were one parent families

Couple families

In June 2025, there were 6.4 million couple families, including:

  • 2.7 million couple families with dependants aged 0-24 years, of these 2.2 million were couple families with children aged 0-14 years
  • 3.7 million couple families without dependants

(a) The sum of each group does not sum to 100% as some family members will have a labour force status of 'Not determined'.

Couple families with dependants

Of the 2.7 million couple families with dependants:

  • 2.6 million (95%) couple families with dependants had one or both parents employed
  • Almost 2.0 million (73%) had both parents employed, of which 1.6 million had at least one child aged 0-14

In June 2025, of the 2.2 million couple families with children aged 0-14 years:

  • 73% had both parents employed
  • 22% had one parent employed
  • 3% had neither parent employed
  • 36% had both parents working full-time
  • 3% had both parents working part-time
  • 35% had one parent working full-time and one parent working part-time

Since 2005, the proportion of couple families with children or dependants aged 0-14, where both parents were employed has increased from 60% to 73%, while the proportion with just one parent employed has decreased from 33% to 22%.

In June 2025, there were 502,000 couple families (8% of all couple families) where the youngest dependant was aged 15–24 years.

(a) The sum of each group does not sum to 100% as some family members will have a labour force status of 'Not determined'.

In June 2025, of couple families with dependants 90% had a husband/partner who was employed and 78% had a wife/partner who was employed.

The proportion of couple families where the husband/partner was employed was 92% where the youngest child was aged 0-4 years, and 86% where the youngest dependant was aged 15-24. The proportion of couple families where the wife/partner was employed was 71% where the youngest children aged 0-4 years and 80% where the youngest dependant was aged 15-24.

One parent families

There were 1.2 million one parent families in June 2025, accounting for 16% of all families. Of these one parent families, 752,000 (61%) had dependants aged 0-24 years.

The majority (79%) of one parent families with children and dependants were headed by a single mother.

The parent was employed in 73% of one-parent families with dependants. Of these:

  • 419,000 had an employed single mother
  • 129,000 had an employed single father

Of all one parent families with dependants, 71% of single mothers were employed compared with 81% of single fathers.

Just over three-quarters (77%) of families with employed single mothers and dependants had mothers aged between 35 and 54 years.

The proportion of one parent families with dependants that had an employed parent was lowest when the youngest dependant was aged 0-4

Based on denominator of one parent families headed by father and mother respectively.

Households

Estimates for the number of households, types of households and average number of people per household are based on independent demographic counts of households and household size which are used in benchmarking the families estimates.

In June 2025, there were 10.9 million households (in private dwellings). Of these:

  • 7.4 million were households with one family
  • 202,000 were households with more than one family (multiple family households)
  • 325,000 were group households of non-relatives
  • 3 million households were people living alone

Average household size was 2.5 people in June 2025, down from 2.6 people in June 2015.

Data downloads

Download all (15.37 MB)

Tables

Data files

Labour Force Status of Families microdata in DataLab

Labour Force Status of Families microdata for June 2025 is now available in ABS DataLab, released as a supplementary file for the Longitudinal Labour Force (LLFS) microdata. All existing users of the LLFS microdata will automatically get access to the Labour Force Status of Families file and new users can apply for access to both files.

A detailed data item list for the Labour Force Status of Families microdata is available in Microdata and TableBuilder: Labour Force Status of Families.

Labour Force Status of Families in TableBuilder

The June 2025 Labour Force Status of Families Tablebuilder file will be released on 15 October 2025.

Previous catalogue number

This release previously used catalogue number 6224.0.55.001.

Methodology

Labour Force Status of Families methodology, June 2025