Where the Bangladeshi community lives in Melbourne

Fawkner has the largest Bangladeshi community: 2% of residents were born in Bangladesh and 2.8% speak Bengali at home. Weir Views and Truganina follow. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 47 eligible Melbourne suburbs. In Melbourne suburbs of 2,000+ residents, 0.2% of people were born in Bangladesh (2021 Census).

Suburbs are ordered by the share of residents who were born in Bangladesh. The census publishes no Bangladeshi ancestry category. Bengali speakers are shown alongside, but the ranking stays on birthplace: Bengali is also the language of West Bengal in India, so ranking on it would fold a second community into this one. 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.

They are different census angles on the Bangladeshi community: country of birth counts only those who migrated and language at home counts the actively speaking core. They rarely match, and seeing them together tells you whether a suburb's community is long-established, newly-arrived, or somewhere in between.

They measure different things and come from different census questions. Ancestry is a multiple-response question (a person can report up to two), so it isn't a clean share of population; birthplace counts only people born overseas; and language counts only those who still speak it at home. This is descriptive demographic data, not a recommendation to seek out or avoid anywhere.

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.