Housing loan repayment explained Place Forecast Feature
Abbreviated as MRERD; referenced by 5 other explainers
Place Forecast Feature
Housing loan repayments shows how much households pay each month on the loan for their home. It counts dwellings with a mortgage, the homes being bought with a loan on Census night.
These figures are Place Forecast estimates based on Census data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
There are eleven dollar groups, from $0 to $299 a month up to $4,000 and over. A twelfth group is Not stated.
The amounts are what households said they paid in August of each Census year. Interest rates rose after 2021, so many repayments are now higher.
Homes owned outright are not counted. Nor are rented homes. Look at tenure type to see how many homes in an area have a mortgage. To see what renters pay, look at housing rental payments.
Not stated covers homes where the question was left blank.
Some forecasts can also show these repayments by dwelling structure: separate house, semi-detached or townhouse, flat or apartment, and other dwelling. The Census counts each dollar group by dwelling structure too. Those counts do not quite add up to the dollar groups, because of perturbation. So each dollar group's homes are shared across dwelling structures by those counts. Where those counts are all zero, the mix of the area around them is used. Then the dwelling structures are matched to the council's published counts. The dwelling structures in each dollar group add up to exactly that group's figure.
Reading this data fairly
These figures show how people answered Census questions. Here are the equity caveats to keep in mind. They keep the numbers fair:
- A repayment does not show income. A high repayment can be easy for one household and hard for another. Mortgage affordability compares repayments with income.
- The dollar groups are set by the ABS and can change from one Census to the next.
See the marker methodology for how these figures are calculated and their limitations.