Many politicians are claiming that mass migration is the cause of housing unaffordability in Australia. While high volume of migrant intake is a problem, especially, taking in migrants from problematic regions with radical ideologies is a problem, claiming that immigrants are to be blamed for the high house prices in Australia is disingenuous.
Here are some numbers regarding housing and immigration volumes in Australia:
On average, we are building around 100,000 new private homes per year across Australia1. At the same time, on average, we have about 550,000 migrants entering Australia per year. In 2024-25, we had 568,000 migrants arriving in Australia2.
Some look at these figures and think that this high volume of immigration must be the cause of house prices soaring. However, when we dig into the data further, it soon becomes apparent that migrants are only one (small) part of the problem!
Out of 568,000 migrants that arrived in 2024-25, 363,000 of them are temporary residents3. But temporary residents only account for about 1% of the total house purchases in Australia (I don’t have complete historic data, but this is accurate for 2022-23). In terms of actual figures (in 2022-23), that’s a total of 5,360 foreign buyers vs 665,000 local buyers4. So, they are not a critical contributor to the housing crisis here. Out of the remaining 205,000 migrants, 64,000 are returning Australian citizens, and 53,000 are NZ citizens. That leaves us with 88,000 permanent residents. Let’s average that to 90,000 permanent resident intake per year.
While the latest migrant settlement outcomes data isn’t readily available, based on the trends available up to 20215, out of the 90,000 permanent residents, 59% (53,100) are in the skilled migrants’ stream, 32% are in the family stream (28,800), and 9% are in the humanitarian stream (8,100). Out of these, about 65% of the skilled migrants own a home6 (about 28,826 people); about 58% of the family stream migrants own a home7 (about 19,794 people); about 38% from the humanitarian stream own a home8 (about 4,381 people).
Oh, by the way, the calculations above are conservative because they assume that the permanent migrants are buying homes in the year of their arrival, which isn’t true. More than 71% of permanent migrants who own a home have lived in Australia for more than 10 years. Only 38% of the permanent migrants who lived in Australia for less than 5 years own a house9. But, for now, let’s run with the worst-case figures calculated above.
What does that show us? Well, out of the 550,000+ migrants that are arriving in Australia per year, only about 58,36010 are buying homes. So, to claim that less than 60,000 migrants per year are causing the Australian housing market to explode is an unreasonable and disingenuous claim.
- An average of 25,000 private homes are completed per quarter/year. See more at: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-activity-australia/latest-release ↩︎
- Overseas Migration, 2024-25 financial year | Australian Bureau of Statistics ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- These charts show the effect of migration on Australia’s housing story – ABC News ↩︎
- Permanent migrants in Australia, 2021 | Australian Bureau of Statistics ↩︎
- Migrant settlement outcomes, 2025 | Australian Bureau of Statistics ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- Sum of the number of permanent residents owning homes plus average foreign buyers per year combined. ↩︎