Sydney is home to most of the least affordable electorates in which to buy a home across Australia, new data reveals.

And the least affordable rental electorates are found in regional Queensland and regional NSW.

With housing being a critical election issue, real-estate services firm CoreLogic has analysed housing and rental affordability across each electorate around the country.

At a national level, the report laid bare the magnitude of Australia’s housing affordability crisis.

Overall, the report indicated that:

• In 2024, median dwelling prices stood at 8.0 times average household incomes. This means that a household on the median income now needs to spend eight times their annual gross income to purchase a median price dwelling. This is up from a dwelling price to income ratio of 6.0 to 1 twenty years earlier in 2004.
• To service a new mortgage for a median priced dwelling, the average household would need to spend 60.5 percent of their income on their mortgage – up from 35 percent twenty years earlier in 2004. This is alarming as households are considered to be in housing stress if they need to spend more than 30 percent of their income on their mortgage or rent.
• To purchase a median priced dwelling with a 20 percent deposit, the average household needs to save for more than 10 years (10.6 years).
• For renters, the average household needs to fork out 32.9 percent of their income in order to pay the rent on an average rental property. This is up from around 26 percent twenty years earlier in 2004 and is above the 30.0 percent level above which households are in rental stress.

Turning to specific electorates, Sydney is the nation’s hotspot where buying a home is unaffordable.

All up, Sydney is home to four out of the top five and twelve of the top 20 least affordable electorates in which to buy a home.

Top of the list is Bradfield in Sydney’s north, with a median dwelling values across the electorate stand at $2.720 million. This is equivalent to 16.5 times average household income.

To service a 20 percent deposit, the average household within the electorate would need to fork out 104 percent of their incomes.

Saving for such a deposit would take the average household almost 22 years.

Bradfield was followed by McKellar on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Banks in the Inner South West and Fowler in the South West.

By contrast, Solomon in Darwin is the most affordable electorate for home purchases. Even here, however, average households need to save for more than five and a half years in order to achieve a 20 percent home deposit on a median priced home.

(source: CoreLogic)

Turning to rents, affordability challenges are particularly acute in regional New South Wales and regional Queensland.

Top of the list is Richmond in New South Wales, in which median income households need to pay 49.4 percent of their average income to pay rent on a median priced rental property.

This is followed by Mcpherson on the Gold Coast, Cowper in the mid north coast of NSW, Moncrieff on the Gold Coast and Hinkler in Queensland’s Wide Bay region.

(source: CoreLogic)

The analysis comes as housing affordability is a critical issue in this Saturday’s election.

On the government side, Labor has promised to enable all Australians to buy their first home with a 5 percent deposit and invest $10 billion into grants and interest free loans to construct up to 100,000 homes that would be for sale exclusively to first home buyers.

This builds on existing Labor actions including the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) and doubling the amount of money which apprentices in housing construction trades are able to access in order to complete their apprenticeship.

Meanwhile, the Coalition’s main promises include $5 billion in enabling infrastructure, employer incentives to take on new apprentices, allowing people to use superannuation to purchase their first home, clearing a backlog of existing dwelling approval applications, avoiding changes to the National Construction Code for up to 10 years and easing pressures on new housing demand by restricting immigration levels.

But the Coalition says it will abolish the HAFF.

This has drawn criticism from housing and welfare groups who say that it will leave tens of thousands of Australians who seek homelessness support unable to access secure housing.

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