Migration out of Sydney and Melbourne continues in the September quarter

There is a very clear and strong trend of migration out of Sydney into regional NSW. The Blue Mountains and Central Coast are part of Sydney, so this movement is beyond these areas. The regional NSW movement has been happening since before COVID-19, but the trend has accelerated during the pandemic. This quarterly rate represents about 20,000 people per annum moving to regional NSW from Sydney if the trend continues a whole year. Additionally about 2,500 people per quarter (10,000 p.a.) are moving to Queensland, with only minor trends to other states and regions.

If this trend continues for a year, that’s a net loss of over 30,000 people from Sydney to elsewhere in Australia. It has been running at around 20,000 p.a. for many years, but appears to have accelerated. Despite this movement outwards, Sydney’s population has been growing in previous years (at around 80,000-100,000 p.a.), driven by large overseas migration. The overseas migration has virtually ceased since March 2020. With natural increase (births minus deaths) in Sydney sitting at about 38,000 p.a. there is a very real chance that the next year could see negative population growth in Australia’s largest city. Even if not negative, it will be a very small amount of growth indeed, compared to what we are used to.

The next important release is Local Government Area population data for the year ended June 2020. This is slated for March 30th, and will be loaded into the .id toolkits soon after. This release also contains migration updates at a local area level – so you can see where people are moving to and from in your area. We plan to bring this updated dataset to Community Profile (profile.id) shortly.