Migration eases but growth remains strong: Australia’s population to March 2025

Australia is growing, but not the same everywhere.

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The latest population numbers to March 2025 are out for Australia, States and Territories.

This is the third quarter of the financial year, with populations for smaller areas (eg. LGAs) always estimated at the June quarter only. Australia's population is still growing strongly, but overseas migration which was driving the huge post-COVID growth has pulled back to levels more consistent with the immediate pre-COVID years. This dataset presents the quarterly update on Estimated Resident Population (ERP) for the States and Territories of Australia. 

At March 31^st, 2025, the population of Australia was 27,536,874 people, up by 423,357 people from the previous year, or 1.56%. That's down from a peak of 2.53% annual growth recorded at the height of the post-COVID migration boom in September 2023. This is the lowest annual growth rate recorded since June 2022 (1.30%) which was the last quarter affected by border closures. Growth remains high in historic terms – since 2006 Australia has been growing at a higher rate with consistently higher migration, but the last year has seen a reversion towards that average, not the pre-2006 average, which tended to be lower.

With a low birth rate (1.50 in 2023, and we get an update to 2024 next month), most of Australia’s population growth continues to come through migration. Approximately 75% of Australia's growth came through net migration and the other 25% from natural increase (births minus deaths).

While it has slowed, the net migration is still higher than any year prior to 2022. The annual net migration was 315,924, for the year ended March. Quarterly net migration in the March quarter is always high, and this year was 110,062. March is the quarter when the students arrive, and a lot of Australia’s long-term migration comes through overseas student arrivals. But this March was the lowest since 2022, when the borders had just reopened after the pandemic closures. This migration trend is much more in line with with .id's population forecast assumptions, which have long-term net migration around the 280,000 mark.

Migration has been in the news a lot lately, and a lot of figures get bandied around. Mostly those with an interest in showing that Australia’s migration is high focus on the “gross” or “in-migration” figure. For the year ended March 2025 that was 578,306. But they conveniently forget the “out-migration” which was also substantial at 262,417, leading to the lower net migration figure above. Governments have some control over the in-migration (sometimes referred to as intake – in 3 streams, skilled, family and humanitarian) – there is less control over emigration, which is why net migration can fluctuate substantially. During the COVID pandemic we had higher emigration than immigration, due to the border closures and hotel quarantine program.  Part of the reason that net migration was so high in the 2023 and 2024 years was that most of those who left had already emigrated during the previous couple of years, and there was a pent up demand of people waiting to migrate in. This has now returned to “business as usual”.

This is what the net migration looks like for the past 30 years (3/4 of the latest year) – you can see this is falling back towards the average since 2006, but not the lower rate prior to that. It’s still a little higher than this average, we are likely looking at a full financial year net migration figure of around 305,000-310,000.

At a state level, Western Australia is now the fastest growing state, at 2.28% p.a., well ahead of Victoria and Queensland, very close at 1.80% and 1.78% for second and third. Nevertheless the 3 mainland eastern states (NSW, Vic, Qld) between them accounted for 77% of the nation’s population growth (they contain 77% of the population of Australia, so that is proportional).

Tasmania has by far the slowest growth, at 0.20% for the year, the only one below 1% growth. The population of Tasmania added only a little over 1,000 people, and this was entirely dependent on overseas migration. More Tasmanians continue to move back to the mainland after an influx during COVID. Tasmania is also the state closest to having negative natural increase, due to the low birth rate and older population, adding only 179 people for the year in natural increase.

Queensland is the state least reliant on overseas migration, due to the high interstate migration. It had a net interstate migration for the year of +24,015, which was more than twice as much as WA, the next highest at +11,675.  These were the only two states with positive interstate migration. All others had a net loss to Qld and WA, with the largest share coming from NSW which consistently loses population interstate (every year since 1979). 

The Northern Territory and ACT were the jurisdictions with the largest share of population growth coming from natural increase.

Two states have recently hit major milestones, with Victoria's population reaching 7 million, and Western Australia reaching 3 million.

The ABS have made significant adjustments to the past few years interstate migration estimates, by using different sources such as Tax Office data to supplement Medicare change of address records and make these more accurate.

The March 2025 release of National Population Growth by the ABS provides the latest quarterly information on population change at a national and state level. Local area populations (including cities, SA2s and LGAs) are only released for the June quarter each year, and this is what appears on the the .id Community Profile and Economic Profile sites. We normally don't publish the quarterly estimates for States and Territories because they are used as benchmarks in our local datasets and for these interim time periods they don't match to any local numbers. The next major update to population numbers will be in March 2026, for June 2025 data. Prior to that we’ll get a state/territory and national population update for the full financial year ended June 2025 in December 2025.

.id’s population forecasts always estimate annual population at the end of June each year, to match the small area ERPs. As such they are not directly comparable to these quarterly figures. See the original source data for this update on the ABS website here.