Referenced by 18 other explainers
Not stated is the label the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) uses when a Census question is left blank or cannot be sorted into a category. It means the question was not answered or could not be sorted. It does not describe the person.
Some Census topics have a separate Not stated category. Others do not. This depends on how the ABS shares each dataset.
When a page has a Not stated category, it can help show how full the answers were. A higher Not stated share may suggest that people skipped the question or found it hard or too personal to answer.
When a page has no Not stated category, blank answers may already be part of the published totals, or the ABS may handle them in another way.
Each explainer page describes how Not stated is handled for that dataset.