Australia's official income and wealth survey has been dark since 2019-20

Australia has no current official measure of how income and wealth are shared between its households. The most recent Survey of Income and Housing results published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics cover the 2019-20 financial year and were released in 2022. The collection meant to replace them, covering 2023-24, was taken from about 30,000 households and then abandoned.

In a media statement dated 17 July 2025, the ABS said it would not release any outputs from the 2023-24 survey. Two publications were cancelled: Income and Wealth, Australia, and Housing Occupancy and Costs, Australia. The bureau said that while compiling the results it identified serious shortcomings in the questionnaire design and data collection processes, and that the data did not meet its standards. Deputy Australian Statistician Phillip Gould said producing reliable statistics was the bureau's top priority and that it would only release data it could stand by. The statement said lessons had been carried into the 2025-26 survey, then in the field, with results expected in mid 2027.

The figures left standing are old. The 2019-20 release put the Gini coefficient for equivalised disposable household income at 0.324, down from 0.328 in 2017-18, and the Gini for household net worth at 0.611, down from 0.621. It found the highest 20 per cent of households held 62.8 per cent of all household wealth and the lowest 20 per cent held 0.7 per cent, with mean net worth of about $3.27 million in the top quintile against about $35,100 in the bottom. They describe the country as it stood before the inflation and the housing market movements of the six years since, including the $305.8 billion rise in the value of land and dwellings that the ABS recorded in the March quarter of 2026 alone.

The second official distributional series is also frozen. The ABS product that splices survey micro data onto the national accounts, Australian National Accounts: Distribution of Household Income, Consumption and Wealth, was last published on 13 December 2022 for the 2021-22 financial year. That release showed the tax and transfer system doing heavy work: the lowest income quintile's share of income rose from 4.1 per cent before government redistribution to 12.0 per cent after it, while the highest quintile's share fell from 47.8 per cent to 34.9 per cent. The page carries no forward date. Next release: unknown.

What has not stopped is the aggregate. On 25 June 2026 the ABS published Australian National Accounts: Finance and Wealth for the March quarter 2026, reporting total household net worth of $19,211.9 billion, up $224.9 billion or 1.2 per cent in the quarter. Land and dwellings rose 2.4 per cent, or $305.8 billion, while superannuation reserves fell $72.9 billion on market revaluations. Australia therefore knows, to a tenth of a percentage point and within weeks of the quarter closing, how much household wealth exists. It does not know, on current official evidence, who holds it.

The gap is already shaping public argument. Writing in Inside Story on 3 June 2025, the economist Saul Eslake used the 2019-20 survey to show the wealthiest 20 per cent of households lifting their share of wealth from 59.0 per cent in 2003-04 to 62.8 per cent in 2019-20, and households with a reference person aged 65 or over lifting their share from 24.8 per cent to 35.6 per cent, a rise far larger than that age group's growth in numbers. He noted plainly that the latest available survey was 2019-20.

Not everyone thought the survey was adequate even when it was current. In The Conversation on 20 December 2017, Christopher Sheil and Frank Stilwell argued the survey gave no usable information on the wealth of the top 10 per cent, let alone the top 1 per cent, and that they had been forced to rely on figures the ABS supplied to the OECD but did not publish in Australia. Their prescription was to rebuild the survey and integrate it with national accounts and tax data. The ABS decision of July 2025 concerns collection quality rather than top end coverage, and the two criticisms are not the same complaint.

What is not known is when the series resumes and in what form. The ABS has said results from the 2025-26 survey are expected in mid 2027, which would leave a gap of about five years between publications and six years between reference periods. The bureau's list of current household surveys, checked on 17 August 2026, names only the Monthly Population Survey and the Family and Community Experiences Survey, so the 2025-26 income collection appears to have left the field. Whether the ABS will publish anything to bridge the interval, and whether the review it conducted of the failed collection will be released in full, remains unclear from its published pages.