Best Cairns suburbs for rental yield

Manoora leads the house list at 5.5% gross — $32,000 a year on a $580,000 median. Edge Hill leads the unit list, at 7.4%. Across both lists, gross yields span 4.7% to 7.4%.

By gross rental yield alone — median advertised weekly rent × 52, divided by median asking price — highest first. Growth, safety, walkability and the depth of the rental market are shown for every Cairns suburb in the list, but they do not move it up or down. Where two suburbs have the same yield, the one with the deeper rental market is listed first.

It is the obvious worry, and this list was blended for that reason until September 2026 — yield rises as price falls, and price falls partly because of bushfire, crime and flood exposure. Measured across eight capital lists, it did not happen. To be eligible a suburb needs enough sale listings and enough advertised rentals to have a real median, and it has to clear a hazard floor, which together already exclude the thin fringe. Ordering purely on yield moved average safety across the lists by under two percentile points, and in some capitals it improved. So Cairns is now ordered by the number in the title. The caution that does still apply is the value trap: a high yield with no capital growth can still be a poor investment, which is why growth is shown beside every suburb.

Gross. It does not deduct strata or body-corporate fees, council rates, water, landlord insurance, property management (typically 5 to 8 percent of rent), maintenance, or vacancy between tenancies. Net yield after those costs is commonly 1 to 1.5 percentage points lower and varies far more by individual property than by suburb. Treat these figures as a way to compare suburbs, not as a projected return on a specific purchase.

Unit yields run systematically higher than house yields in the same suburb — units cost less to buy but rent for proportionally more. Blending them into one list would fill it almost entirely with units and tell a house investor nothing. Note that units also carry strata fees, which gross yield doesn't deduct, so the gap narrows on a net basis.

A suburb needs at least 5 sale listings and 5 rental listings of the property type in the last 6 months, so both sides of the ratio rest on a real sample rather than one or two advertisements. It also has to clear a combined bushfire, crime and flood safety floor. Suburbs below either threshold are excluded, not penalised.

The top 15 is recomputed after each property-listings refresh — monthly on the 1st. Both the rent and the price side come from the same six-month window of public listings, so the two halves of the ratio always cover the same period.