Household type explained Place Forecast Feature

Referenced by 1 other explainer

Household type shows who lives together in a household. It sorts an area's households into six groups.

The figures come from Census data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The six groups are:

• Couples with children: a couple living with their children. Adult children at home are counted as children too.
• Couples without children: a couple with no dependent children at home. This includes empty-nesters and couples whose adult children live elsewhere.
• One parent families: one parent living with their children. A grandparent who is the main carer is counted as the parent here.
• Other families: related adults who are not a couple and not a parent with a child. For example, two adult siblings.
• Lone person households: one person living alone.
• Group households: unrelated adults sharing a household.

Two ABS groups are not shown here. They are Visitor only households, and Other non-classifiable households. They are not in the public tables we use. Together they are usually a small share.

When a household has more than one family, the Census puts it in the group that fits the main family. A household with grandparents, parents, and children is counted as Couples with children. Same-sex parents, blended families, step-families, and de facto parents all sit in the family groups above. The six groups follow the ABS code. They do not follow how people see their own family. Kinship and extended-family living is split across these six groups. This is often the case for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and CALD households.

The total counts only occupied private dwellings. It does not count empty homes. It also does not count hotels, aged-care homes, hostels, or shared housing. Areas with many people in non-private homes may have more people than the household count shows.

Place Forecast stores household type at the mesh block level. The ABS Census publishes it at SA1. We split each SA1 across its mesh blocks by the share of occupied private dwellings. Then we add the mesh blocks back up to the area you see. So the figures for very small areas are an estimate, not a direct ABS count.

At the LGA level, our figure for each household type matches the ABS figure exactly. We get there in two steps. First, we add up the mesh-block values inside the LGA. Then we scale each group so its sum equals the ABS LGA figure. The page total may differ from the ABS total by a few households. That small gap is perturbation, a privacy step the ABS uses on its counts. We anchor on the per-group figures so each group matches ABS. We let the total carry the gap.