Most liveable suburbs in Gold Coast

Benowa is the highest-rated suburb on the list, graded A+. Its strongest input is schools, where it ranks above 100% of suburbs in the state.

No. This is the SuburbScan Liveability Rating, which we calculate ourselves. No government agency grades Australian suburbs from A+ to D — that letter is ours, and the formula behind it is published rather than proprietary.

It blends 25% schools, 25% safety, 25% socio-economic advantage, 15% walkability, and 10% distance to the city. Each input is a percentile rank against other suburbs in the same state, so a suburb reads as better than a given share of its state on that measure, and the five are then weighted into one score.

Because the letter on this page has to match the letter on the suburb's own page. The rating is a state-wide percentile; re-ranking it inside Gold Coast would produce a different order here from the one shown everywhere else on the site.

Either it is Unrated or it is too small for this list. A suburb is Unrated when it has under 500 residents or too few of the five inputs to score honestly, and we leave those out rather than rank them last — an unrated suburb is one we have not measured, not a bad one. This list also only ranks suburbs with at least 1,000 residents.

Often, but the rating does not measure price and does not include it. Socio-economic advantage is one of the five inputs and correlates with price, so the top of this list skews expensive — liveability and affordability are different questions, and this page answers the first.