Best Cairns suburbs to rent in

Trinity Beach leads on supply, with 78 rentals advertised — 11.8 for every 1,000 residents. Median advertised house rents across the list run from $570 to $1,000 a week: the ranking leads on how much is available, not on price. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 30 eligible Cairns suburbs.

Supply, mostly. The hardest part of renting is finding somewhere at all, and a suburb with plenty of properties advertised is both easier to search and one where you have more room to negotiate. So this ranking leads on how many homes are actually advertised for rent relative to the suburb's size (45% of the score), then blends in walkability, public-transport quality and safety — the things that matter most when you may not want to buy a car for a 12-month lease. The top 15 suburbs are shown.

No, and deliberately so. Median asking rent tracks median sale price closely enough that ranking on affordability just reproduces the cheapest-suburbs list — which you could get from a price filter on any listings site. This ranks on how rentable and livable a suburb is. Some of the suburbs here are expensive; they're listed because they have deep rental markets and you can live in them without a car.

No. Vacancy rate is the figure the industry quotes, but no Australian open dataset publishes it at suburb level, so we use advertised listings as the closest available proxy. The difference matters: a suburb can have many listings because it is large or dense rather than because it is genuinely easy to get into. We normalise by population to correct for size, and a suburb needs at least 5 advertised rentals to be ranked at all.

The rental listings are refreshed monthly. The population figure used to normalise them is from the 2021 Census, which is the most recent available at suburb level — so a suburb that has grown quickly since 2021 will read as having more rental supply per resident than it really does. We compress the supply score to stop that distorting the ranking, but it's worth knowing if you're looking at a new growth-corridor suburb.