Where the Afghan community lives in Melbourne

Doveton has the largest Afghan community: 12.2% of residents were born in Afghanistan. Dandenong and Hallam follow. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 37 eligible Melbourne suburbs. In Melbourne suburbs of 2,000+ residents, 0.5% of people were born in Afghanistan (2021 Census).

Suburbs are ordered by the share of residents who were born in Afghanistan. The census publishes no Afghan ancestry category, so country of birth is the only published signal. Only suburbs with at least 2,000 residents are included, and percentile ranks are computed within Melbourne's pool, so the list reflects concentration relative to other metro suburbs.

Dari, Pashto and Hazaragi are not published as separate suburb-level languages — the nearest field, Persian, explicitly excludes Dari — so no language share is shown rather than one that would undercount the community. Other community pages show two or three census angles side by side, but the ABS publishes a fixed list of ancestries, birthplaces and languages, and they do not cover every community equally. We show the figures that exist rather than filling the gaps with a zero, which would read as an absence of people instead of an absence of a question.

The figures are from the 2021 Census, the most recent available until results from the August 2026 Census are released in 2027. The top 15 is recomputed whenever we refresh the census data.