Australian rent trends, Q1 2026: the movers

The headline number, city by city

As of the Q1 2026 data release, average annual rent change is available for 41 of the 44 cities and regions this site tracks. The exceptions are Hobart, Regional TAS and Launceston, where the underlying figure isn't currently populated (more on why below). Across the rest, the range runs from a 12.9% annual rise in Bathurst to a 0.8% annual fall in Broken Hill, the only market in this dataset currently showing a year-on-year decline.

As of this release, the highest-growth markets in the dataset are mid-sized regional and outer-metro centres rather than the largest capitals: Bathurst, Mildura, Regional SA and Bundaberg all outpace Sydney's 6.0% and Melbourne's 4.9% by a wide margin. That's consistent with a pattern that's shown up elsewhere on this site: smaller markets tend to show larger percentage swings, in part because a modest dollar increase on a lower base rent produces a larger percentage change than the same dollar increase would on an already-high capital-city median.

Broken Hill's −0.8% is worth a specific note rather than treating it as just the bottom row of a ranked table: this "city" in the dataset currently consists of a single tracked suburb, Silverton, at $328/week. A single-suburb sample moving from one quarter to the next isn't the same kind of signal as a citywide average blended across hundreds of suburbs elsewhere in this table; it's one data point, not a market trend, and it should be read that way rather than as evidence that far-west NSW rents are broadly falling.

Among the five capital cities with data, the spread is narrower than the regional extremes suggest: Adelaide leads at 6.5%, ahead of Sydney's 6.0% and Wollongong's 6.0%, with Melbourne trailing at 4.9%. None of the capitals come close to the double-digit rises posted by Bathurst, Mildura or Regional SA. Capital-city rent growth in this release cycle is running at roughly half the pace of the fastest-moving regional markets, even though capital medians remain far higher in dollar terms.

The suburbs driving the biggest rises

Suburb-level "biggest rises" data (the specific suburbs behind each city's headline change) is currently only available for cities in NSW and SA. That's the same bond-lodgement coverage gap covered in the bond data methodology guide: Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania don't currently have suburb-level bond-lodgement volume populated in the ingested data, so no suburb in Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart, or any other QLD, VIC or TAS city can be ranked by suburb-level rise in this dataset, even though their citywide averages above are accurate. Where a table below is missing a city, that's the reason, not a claim that rents held flat there.

Sydney

Five Sydney suburbs tie at the same $1,000/week figure and the same 36.05% rise. That's a strong sign of postcode-level grouping in the source data rather than five suburbs coincidentally moving in lockstep (the bond data guide explains why that happens). Sydney's citywide average of 6.0% is a blend across 599 suburbs; these five sit far above that blended figure.

Newcastle

Newcastle's top movers show the largest single percentage rise in this dataset: 87.5% at Hexham, Sandgate and Shortland, against a citywide average of just 10.1%. A rise that large on a relatively low base ($600/week is still under Newcastle's own $650 citywide median) is exactly the kind of outlier a citywide average is meant to absorb; it says more about a low-volume suburb moving off a previously thin base than about the broader Newcastle market repricing overnight.

Adelaide

Adelaide's fastest-rising suburbs sit well above the city's own $598 median rent, unlike Newcastle's, where the fastest risers sit below the citywide figure. That's a reminder that "fastest-rising" and "cheapest" aren't the same category of suburb, and the two comparisons in this guide, one for growth rate and one for affordability, can point at completely different suburbs within the same city.

Regional SA

Regional SA's fastest-rising suburbs are also among its cheapest: Port Pirie tops both the rise table here and the cheapest-suburbs guide's list for the region, at $250/week. That combination, a low base rent climbing quickly, is consistent with Regional SA's citywide 11.9% average (one of the highest in the entire dataset) and stands in contrast to Adelaide's fastest movers above, which are already priced above the Adelaide median before their rise is even counted.

What "estimated" means in a trend line

Suburb pages on this site show a quarterly rent trend going back several quarters, but not every point on that line is a directly observed bond-lodgement figure. Where a suburb's history doesn't have enough recorded data at every quarter, NestLedger backfills a synthetic trend between known points rather than leaving a gap; those interpolated points are explicitly flagged estimated: true in the underlying data, distinct from the live, current-quarter figure.

Punchbowl's own rent history illustrates this: four of its five most recent quarterly points (2025-Q1 through 2025-Q4) are flagged as estimated, interpolated between an earlier known rent and the current $486/week figure, and only the most recent point, 2026-Q1, is a directly observed lodgement-based figure. That doesn't make the estimated points meaningless (they're a reasonable modelled path between two real data points), but it does mean a suburb's trend line should be read as "current figure verified, earlier trajectory modelled," not as five equally-solid quarterly observations.

This matters most for the annual-change figures used throughout this guide, since an annual change is calculated by comparing the current quarter against the same quarter a year earlier. If that year-earlier point happens to be an estimated one rather than a directly observed lodgement figure, the resulting percentage inherits some of that uncertainty. It's a reasonable trade-off given the alternative (a suburb page with a visible gap in its trend line rather than a modelled path through it), but it's part of why this guide treats individual suburb-level swings as illustrative of where rents are moving, not as precise, audited percentages the way a government-published median itself is.

Reading this guide after Q1 2026

Every figure above is specifically a Q1 2026 snapshot, not a running "current" number that updates itself between guide refreshes. Bond-lodgement data behind these figures gets published on a quarterly cycle by each state agency (with lags ranging from about three months to about six months, covered in the bond data methodology guide), so the next meaningful update to this picture will follow the Q2 2026 release schedule for each state, not before. Treat the specific percentages and suburb rankings here as a dated snapshot of one quarter's data, not a live feed. The individual city and suburb pages linked throughout this guide carry whichever figures are most current at the time they're viewed.