How much rent can you actually afford in Australia?

The 30% rule, and why it's the benchmark we use

The standard affordability benchmark used across Australian housing policy, and the one this site runs on, is that rent shouldn't take more than 30% of gross (pre-tax) household income. Spend more than that and you're classified as being in "rental stress," a term that shows up in Census data, state housing reports, and most affordability research.

It's a blunt rule. It doesn't know about your debts, your kids, or whether you'd rather spend on rent and less on everything else. But it's the rule regulators and researchers use, so it's the one that lets you compare your own situation against published averages. The arithmetic is simple:

Maximum weekly rent = (annual gross income × 0.30) ÷ 52

Run that for three incomes:

• $60,000/yr: $60,000 × 0.30 = $18,000 ÷ 52 = $346/week
• $85,000/yr: $85,000 × 0.30 = $25,500 ÷ 52 = $490/week
• $120,000/yr: $120,000 × 0.30 = $36,000 ÷ 52 = $692/week

$85,000 is roughly the full-time median wage in Australia, which is why it's the default salary this site's rent affordability calculator starts from. At that income, $490 a week is a ceiling, not a target.

Max weekly rent by salary

Here's the same formula run across a wider range of incomes, so you can find your own bracket without doing the maths:

If you're renting alone, the number that matters most is the one-bedroom median in the city you're looking at, not the all-dwellings median, which gets pulled up by houses and larger units. That distinction matters more than people expect.

Which capitals actually clear each ceiling

Using the current one-bedroom medians from bond-lodgement data across the cities this site tracks:

The pattern: on a $60,000 salary, Hobart is the only capital in this dataset where the one-bedroom median clears the 30% ceiling outright. Step up to $85,000 and four of the five clear it. Sydney is the outlier, where the one-bedroom median of $610/week sits $120 above the $490 ceiling. You'd need roughly $120,000 gross before Sydney's one-bedroom median clears the 30% line on its own (the median itself, not the cheapest available unit).

It's worth checking a point between $60,000 and $85,000, since a lot changes in that range. At $65,000/yr, the ceiling is $65,000 × 0.30 ÷ 52 = $375/week, just $29 above the $60,000 ceiling. Two capitals clear it against their one-bedroom median: Hobart, at $320/week, comfortably; and Adelaide, at $359.50/week, with only $15.50 to spare. Melbourne's $440 median misses by $65, Brisbane's $470 misses by $95, and Sydney's $610 misses by $235. The notable part is how close Adelaide sits to the line: a $5,000 jump in salary, from $60,000 to $65,000, is enough to flip Adelaide from "no" to "yes" on the table above, while Melbourne and Brisbane need a much larger jump before their own one-bedroom medians clear.

That last point matters: "median" means half of one-bedroom lettings in that city were above this figure and half below. Individual suburbs vary enormously around it; see the cheapest suburbs with a real rental market guide for where the number sits well under the citywide median.

Regional markets clear the lower ceilings easily

The capitals aren't the whole picture. Move outside them and the $346/week ceiling that only Hobart clears among capitals becomes easy to clear in several regional markets:

Regional NSW as an aggregate misses the $346 ceiling by just $4/week, which shows how close that threshold sits to a genuine turning point in the data. A handful of regional cities individually clear it comfortably (Wagga Wagga's $200 median is $146 under the ceiling), even though the region as a whole, averaged across more than a thousand suburbs, sits just above it. This is also why aggregating "regional NSW" into one figure hides more than it reveals; the cheapest suburbs guide breaks specific regional suburbs out individually rather than relying on the regional average.

Where the 30% rule misleads

The rule is a population-level benchmark, not a personal budgeting tool, and it breaks down in two common situations.

High income, low other costs. A single person on $200,000 with no debt and no dependents can comfortably spend well above 30% on rent, because the leftover 70% is still a large number in absolute terms. The rule was built to flag stress at median incomes, not to cap discretionary spending at the top of the income distribution.

Shared housing. The 30% rule is calculated against one income and one rent. Split a lease three ways and the maths changes completely: three people on $60,000 each, each paying a third of a $900/week three-bedroom place, are each paying $300/week against a $346/week ceiling. That's well within the benchmark despite the headline rent looking unaffordable to a single renter. Household income relative to household rent is what actually matters; per-person calculations only work cleanly for solo renters.

There's a third, quieter distortion: the rule uses gross income, before tax. Two people on the same gross salary can have meaningfully different take-home pay depending on deductions, and the 30% ceiling doesn't adjust for that. It's a starting point, not the final word. Run your own numbers with actual take-home pay and fixed costs before treating any ceiling as fixed.

Working out your own ceiling

The fastest way to get a personalised number, including how rent stacks up against groceries, transport, and utilities for a specific suburb, is the rent affordability calculator. For the fuller monthly budget picture, not just the rent line, use the cost of living calculator, which applies the same 30%-of-income logic against a full household budget rather than rent alone.