About SuburbCost
What a suburb really costs
SuburbCost calculates what a suburb costs to run each year: council rates, water, commute, insurance, and strata. Not the purchase price. The holding cost.
Last updated: July 2026 · Data source review: annually each JulyThe problem
Purchase price is one number. Running cost is another.
Property search tools tell you what a suburb costs to buy. None of them tell you what it costs to stay. Council rates, water bills, commute, building insurance. These add up to thousands every year, and they shift significantly between suburbs just a few kilometres apart.
In some Brisbane and Sydney suburbs, annual running costs exceed $15,000. In others they sit under $7,000. The suburb that looks cheap on purchase price is often the most expensive to run, and that gap is invisible in standard property research.
Choosing your commute mode compounds it further. Switching from driving to public transport can change which suburb wins by thousands of dollars a year. SuburbCost shows you both numbers side by side.
Methodology
What SuburbCost calculates
Five cost components make up each suburb's annual total. All figures are in Australian dollars, per year.
Council rates
Annual residential rates for the suburb's local government area. Brisbane City Council covers roughly 60% of Greater Brisbane suburbs.
Water rates
Annual residential water and sewerage charge. Queensland Urban Utilities publishes a typical annual residential bill used as the comparison figure.
Annual commute
Estimated annual commuting cost in your chosen mode. Toggle between public transport and driving to update all totals simultaneously.
Building insurance
Estimated annual premium for the same standard house in every suburb, from ACCC premium rates for the area's cyclone risk and adjusted for flood and fire. Disclosed as estimate on every page.
Body corporate levy
Annual strata levy for unit properties. $0 for house properties. Estimated where no centralised public registry exists.
Commute calculation
How commute costs are calculated
The transport toggle lets you compare driving against public transport for any suburb. Each mode uses a different calculation.
Distance to the CBD × ATO rate
× 2 (return trip)
× return trips/year
× $0.91/km (ATO 2026–27)
= Annual driving cost
Driving cost is based on each suburb's distance to the CBD, across 48 working weeks. Commute frequency tapers with distance: 4 return trips per week near the CBD, easing to 1 per week by 60 km and a floor of half a trip per week from 70 km, since residents further out commute to the CBD less often. The ATO rate of 91 cents per kilometre covers fuel, depreciation, registration, and insurance for an average vehicle.
Which CBD. For suburbs in or near a regional city, distance is measured to that city rather than to the state capital. Newcastle, Wollongong, Coffs Harbour, Wagga Wagga, Albury, Tamworth, Orange, Dubbo, Port Macquarie and Bathurst in New South Wales, and Cairns, Townsville, Toowoomba, Mackay, Maroochydore, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Warwick and Gympie in Queensland. A resident of inner Newcastle is costed on the trip into Newcastle, not the 118 km to Sydney. Suburbs outside those catchments are measured to the state capital.
Minimum trip. The taper reaches zero where a suburb's centre point sits on the city centre, which would price the commute at $0. Because a suburb covers an area and workplaces are spread across it, cost is calculated on a minimum trip of 1.5 km, or $514 a year. The distance shown on the page is always the real one.
Translink flat fare × commute days
× 2 trips per day
× 192 commute days/year
= $192 per year
Queensland's Translink Go Card fare is a flat 50 cents per trip across all zones. The calculation uses 192 commute days (4 days/week × 48 working weeks).
A daily CBD commute from an outer suburb costs several times what an inner-city one does. Cost peaks around the 45 km mark and then eases, because beyond that the modelled trip frequency falls faster than the distance rises, and a suburb 70 km out is not assumed to make a daily run into the city. That shape is what makes the transport toggle matter most in the middle and outer rings.
| Distance to CBD | Return commute trips / week | Annual driving cost |
|---|---|---|
| 5 km (inner) | 3.75 | ~$1,638 |
| 15 km (middle ring) | 3.25 | ~$4,259 |
| 30 km (outer) | 2.5 | ~$6,552 |
| 45 km (far outer) | 1.75 | ~$6,880 |
| 60 km | 1 | ~$5,242 |
| 70 km+ | 0.5 (floor) | ~$3,058 |
| 100 km+ (regional) | flat allowance | $18,200 |
Data sources
Where the data comes from
Every data point links to a primary government or statutory source. No aggregators. Estimates are labelled on the page where they appear. The full list is on the data sources page.
Beyond cost
Risk profile and school ratings
Flood and fire risk ratings (Low, Medium, High) come from state spatial data, not guessed from postcode. In Queensland, flood risk draws on Queensland Globe flood extent layers, council hazard overlays and the February 2022 Brisbane flood dataset; fire risk uses QFES bushfire prone land mapping. In New South Wales, fire risk uses the RFS Bush Fire Prone Land layer, rated by how much of each suburb is high-hazard vegetation. NSW flood has no single statewide layer, so we model it from a 30 m elevation model and label it as modelled. Each suburb is classified from its own spatial footprint.
School scores (0 to 10) use ACARA's ICSEA Percentile divided by 10. A national average school scores around 7.0. Schools are matched to suburbs using coordinates from ACARA's School Location 2025 dataset against ABS suburb boundary files.
The team
Who built SuburbCost
SuburbCost is a Brisbane project built by someone who wanted to know the real cost of living, but didn't want to navigate multiple sites and annual budgets to find out. Council rates, water, commute, insurance. Costs that quietly add up to tens of thousands over a decade.
No investors. No sponsored rankings. No advertiser influence on the data. Revenue comes from SuburbCost Pro, a paid tool for property professionals, and from a disclosed referral arrangement with mortgage brokers. We may receive a referral fee if you ask us to introduce you to a broker. It is declared in the footer and on the page where the offer is made, and it costs you nothing.
SuburbCost is not a real estate agency, mortgage broker, buyer's agent, or financial adviser. It does not hold an Australian Credit Licence or Australian Financial Services Licence.
Questions or data corrections: contact@suburbcost.com.au
SuburbCost
ABN 29 765 906 768
Bowen Hills QLD 4006, Australia
contact@suburbcost.com.au
Registration can be confirmed on the Australian Business Register. If a figure on this site is wrong, email us and we will correct it and say so.
Evidence
What can be checked independently
Anyone can say their data is good. This section lists the parts of SuburbCost that someone else can verify without taking our word for it, and says plainly where that evidence does not yet exist.
The dataset is deposited and citable
The council rates data is published under CC BY 4.0 with a permanent identifier, on three independent platforms. The DOI is minted by Zenodo, which is operated by CERN, not by us.
The insurance estimates against an independent benchmark
Building insurance is AI-estimated, which is the weakest component on the site and is labelled as an estimate wherever it appears. The question that matters is whether the estimates behave like real premiums. The ACCC's Northern Australia Insurance Inquiry found home-only premiums in northern Australia ran about 2.1 times the rest of the country, on 2018-19 data.
Before any adjustment, our estimates for northern Queensland above the Tropic of Capricorn averaged $5,785 against $2,762 for South East Queensland below 26 degrees south: 2.09 times on means and 2.14 times on medians, against the ACCC's 2.1. That did not prove any single suburb's figure was right. It did show the estimates carried the north-south gradient the regulator measured, rather than a flat guess.
That gradient has since narrowed. The cyclone reinsurance pool began in July 2022, and the ACCC's June 2026 monitoring report puts the home building gap at 1.63 times in 2024-25. On 22 October 2026 we scaled every northern estimate down by the same proportion so our gap matches that figure. The current figures are below. Because the gap is now set to the ACCC's, it is no longer an independent check; the 2018-19 agreement above is.
| Region | Suburbs | Mean | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northern Queensland | 414 | $4,496 | $4,800 |
| South East Queensland | 1,201 | $2,762 | $2,900 |
The full working, with the ACCC series year by year, is in the Queensland home insurance study.
The ACCC's other headline figure, 1.8 times for combined home and contents, has no counterpart here. Our unit figure is contents-only cover, because the body corporate insures the building, so it is a different product and comparing the two would be the wrong comparison rather than a failed one.
Three rating bases, kept separate on purpose
Queensland publishes a minimum residential general rate, which is a floor. New South Wales publishes an average residential rate through the Office of Local Government, uplifted by that council's IPART peg, which is a typical bill. Victorian figures are an average residential rate built from each council's own budget. Each Victorian figure was read from the council's own 2026-27 budget, its statement of rates and charges, not inferred.
These are three different statistics. Rankings on this site are always within a single state, and a national table built by stacking them would be wrong. If you see one attributed to SuburbCost, it did not come from here.
Figures are checked against their own source
The rate calculator requires every stored council minimum to reproduce exactly from that council's published rate in the dollar and its minimum. A mismatch stops the build rather than shipping. That gate is what caught Cairns at $1,165.50, where the stored figure had rounded the half down while the rest of the site rounds half up.
The dataset build runs its own self-checks before writing, including one that fails if any property price, median or capital growth figure has entered the data. That rule is editorial, not a gap: those numbers are deliberately never published here.
What there is no evidence for yet
No third party has cited SuburbCost in published work that we are aware of. The press kits exist and the dataset is deposited, but no outlet, institution or paper has picked it up so far. When that changes this section will say so, with links. Until then there is nothing here to show, and a page claiming otherwise would be the opposite of evidence.
Coverage
Queensland and New South Wales. More states next.
SuburbCost covers more than 6,200 suburbs across two states. In Queensland that spans Brisbane City, Moreton Bay, Logan, Ipswich, Redland City, Sunshine Coast, Noosa, Gold Coast, Toowoomba, Cairns, Mackay and Townsville. In New South Wales it spans every Greater Sydney council, plus Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Wollongong, the Central Coast, the Northern Rivers and regional NSW.
The calculation works the same across state lines. Council rates, water providers and public-transport fares differ between Queensland and New South Wales, so we source each state directly: QLD councils and Sydney Water, NSW councils and Opal fares. Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide come next.
If your suburb is not listed yet, email contact@suburbcost.com.au to request it.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Start here
See what your suburb really costs
Search any Queensland or NSW suburb. Get council rates, water, commute and insurance totalled up in seconds. Switch between driving and public transport to see how much the choice moves the number.
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