Brisbane has more suburbs than Melbourne. How many suburbs every Australian city and state has.
Australia has 15,335 suburbs and localities, and 687 of them have nobody living in them. Greater Sydney has 921 suburbs, Greater Brisbane 647 and Greater Melbourne 572 — fewer than Brisbane, because Melbourne's suburbs hold more than twice as many people each. The counts for every capital and state, and why you will see other numbers.
Australia has 15,335 suburbs and localities. That is the Australian Bureau of Statistics' count, and it is the closest thing the country has to an official answer. 687 of them had nobody living in them at the 2021 Census: national parks, industrial estates, desert.
Here is how they divide up.
How many suburbs each capital city has
Counted within each city's Greater Capital City area, the ABS's standard boundary for a capital and its surrounds:
| City | Suburbs | Residents (2021) | Average people per suburb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greater Sydney | 921 | 5,227,368 | 5,770 |
| Greater Brisbane | 647 | 2,524,577 | 3,957 |
| Greater Melbourne | 572 | 4,916,862 | 8,641 |
| Greater Adelaide | 493 | 1,387,007 | 2,842 |
| Greater Perth | 396 | 2,116,651 | 5,512 |
| Canberra (ACT) | 136 | 453,859 | 3,574 |
| Greater Hobart | 120 | 247,214 | 2,077 |
| Greater Darwin | 101 | 139,891 | 1,706 |
Average people per suburb counts only suburbs with at least one resident.
Why Brisbane has more suburbs than Melbourne
Melbourne has almost twice Brisbane's population and fewer suburbs. Its suburbs are simply bigger: 8,641 people in the average Melbourne suburb against 3,957 in Brisbane's.
The five most populous suburbs in Australia are all in Melbourne:
| Suburb | Residents (2021) |
|---|---|
| Point Cook | 66,781 |
| Craigieburn | 65,178 |
| Tarneit | 56,370 |
| Melbourne (the CBD suburb) | 54,941 |
| Pakenham | 54,118 |
Brisbane's largest is Caboolture, with 29,534. Suburbs are named and bounded by each state's naming authority, not by the ABS, so a city's count says as much about how finely its streets were divided up as about how big it is.
How many suburbs each state has
| State | Suburbs and localities | With residents | Residents (2021) |
|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 4,542 | 4,347 | 8,060,747 |
| Queensland | 3,233 | 3,110 | 5,141,386 |
| Victoria | 2,944 | 2,835 | 6,494,373 |
| Western Australia | 1,699 | 1,594 | 2,651,542 |
| South Australia | 1,696 | 1,624 | 1,778,260 |
| Tasmania | 776 | 733 | 556,297 |
| Northern Territory | 303 | 273 | 228,976 |
| Australian Capital Territory | 136 | 127 | 453,859 |
Five more sit in the Other Territories, such as Christmas Island and Norfolk Island.
Outside the capitals most of these are rural localities rather than suburbs in the everyday sense. The largest by area is Telfer in Western Australia, at 178,408 square kilometres.
Why you will see other numbers
Ask "how many suburbs does Sydney have?" and you will find different answers — our own city page says 644, the ABS count above says 921. They are all counting something real.
Where the edge of the city is. The Greater Capital City area is drawn wide, to take in everyone who lives and works around a capital. Greater Sydney runs to the Blue Mountains and the Central Coast; its largest "suburb" by area is Blue Mountains National Park, 2,358 square kilometres. A count of the built-up city alone is smaller.
Suburbs or localities. The ABS counts every gazetted suburb and locality, including ones with no houses at all. Lists that leave out the empty ones come in lower: Greater Darwin has 101, but only 82 with anyone living in them.
Suburbs on a boundary. A suburb that straddles the edge of a Greater Capital City area is counted here with whichever side holds most of its land. Eleven do in Greater Hobart and five in Greater Sydney, so a count that includes every suburb touching the boundary comes out a little higher.
Our own city pages. SuburbScan's city pages show smaller numbers again — 644 for Sydney, 385 for Melbourne — because they count the suburbs within a set distance of the city centre: 60 km for Sydney, 50 km for Melbourne. Greater Melbourne reaches further than that, so our page stops short of its edge.
How we did this
Suburbs are the ABS Suburbs and Localities (2021) of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard, Edition 3, excluding the placeholder areas the ABS keeps for people with no usual address and for migratory and offshore residents. Each suburb is assigned to the Greater Capital City area holding most of its land, using the ABS mesh-block allocation files. Residents are the 2021 Census count for each suburb. As a check, the suburbs assigned to Greater Sydney hold 5,227,368 people against the ABS's published 5,231,147 for Greater Sydney; the difference is the suburbs on the boundary.
The 2026 Census will redraw some of these boundaries. We will update the counts when the new geography is published.