Total Value of Dwellings is the ABS’s quarterly estimate of what all of Australia’s residential dwellings are worth together, published beside how many there are and their mean price. As at the June quarter 2026 release, the total stood at $12,688.9 billion, $34.1 billion lower than in the March quarter.
General informationThis page explains an official statistic. It is not financial advice and not a valuation of any home. Every figure is the ABS’s own, dated to the release it came from; the newest figures are always on the ABS’s Total Value of Dwellings page.
Three numbers, one release
The release leads with three figures for the June quarter 2026, and they are built from one another.
- Total value
- $12,688.9bDown $34.1 billion in the quarter
- Number of dwellings
- 11,531,100Up 54,400 in the quarter
- Mean price
- $1,100,400Down $8,200 in the quarter
So in one quarter the stock of homes grew while its total value fell, and the mean price fell with it. Households owned $12,183.3 billion of the total. The ABS splits the value between household and non-household owners using proportions drawn from the most recent Census.
The count is wider than owner-occupied houses. It takes in dwellings whose main purpose is residential whoever owns or lives in them, including government-owned homes and homes held by private landlords.
How the mean price is made
The mean price is not an average of the homes that sold. The ABS takes the total value of all residential dwellings and divides it by its estimate of how many dwellings there are.
$12,688.9 billion ÷ 11,531,100 dwellings ≈ $1,100,407
The published mean is $1,100,400. The small gap is rounding: the ABS calculates its means from unrounded figures, so the published components cannot always be combined to reproduce the totals exactly. The arithmetic is ours; the three figures are the ABS’s.
The release also carries medians, in its second table, for established houses and for attached dwellings, by capital city and the rest of each state. A median is the price at the midpoint: half the properties sold in the period went for less and half for more, with no grouping or weighting applied. The mean, by contrast, covers the whole state and every dwelling type, and the ABS asks for caution when the two are compared.
How the total is built
For quarters it can measure fully, the ABS’s methodology works in steps.
- Start from sales. A quarterly dataset of all Australian residential property sales, each placed in the quarter its contracts were exchanged, the date the ABS treats as closest to when the price was set. For the total value it uses only records from state and territory land titles or valuation offices, not real estate agents’ data.
- Group the homes. Prices, numbers and values are grouped by small area (Statistical Area Level 2) and by type: established houses and attached dwellings.
- Let sold homes stand for unsold ones. The prices of homes sold in the period represent the homes that did not sell, giving a mean price for each group.
- Count the stock. Dwelling counts from the latest Census, plus net additions since, estimated from completions in the ABS’s building activity figures.
- Multiply and add up. Price and quantity are combined in each small area, then summed to state, territory and national totals.
The total value series began in the September quarter 2011, and the estimates feed the household balance sheet in Australia’s national accounts.
Why the newest quarter is preliminary
Sales records reach the ABS with a lag, so for the newest quarter there are too few to use the steps above. Instead it estimates the change in mean price for each state and territory from the movement in a commercial home value index, and that quarter is labelled preliminary. Every estimate for the current quarter carries that label.
The second and third most recent quarters are then revised as completions and sales data arrive, and the third is treated as final. After that a figure changes only in exceptional circumstances, such as correcting a significant error. Median prices and sale counts are revised over a longer stretch, the most recent ten quarters.
The December quarter 2021 total was first published as a preliminary $9,901.6 billion, in the final issue of the ABS Residential Property Price Indexes, a series that ended with that December 2021 release. The June quarter 2026 release prints the same quarter at $9,914.2 billion.
The $12.6 billion between them is our own subtraction. Since that first estimate the quarter has been through the ABS’s usual revisions, and the series has been re-based on the 2021 Census from the September quarter 2021, a change brought in with the March quarter 2023 issue. The ABS does not say how much of the gap comes from each. A figure quoted from an old release is a figure from that day.
State by state
The same release breaks the figures down by state and territory. In the June quarter 2026 the total value fell in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory and rose everywhere else.
| State or territory | Mean price, June quarter 2026 | Total value in the quarter |
|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | $1,304,900, the highest | Fell 2.0% ($92.9b) |
| Queensland | $1,130,600 | Rose |
| Western Australia | $1,123,700 | Rose |
| Victoria | $918,400 | Fell 1.6% ($44.3b) |
| Australian Capital Territory | $981,700 | Fell 0.7% ($1.4b) |
| Northern Territory | $614,400, the lowest | Rose |
Each mean in the table is an average across every dwelling type in a whole state or territory, city and country together. The figures the release gives for a capital city on its own are its medians, published separately for each capital city and the rest of its state.
The next two releases
The ABS lists the September quarter 2026 release for 1 December 2026 and the December quarter 2026 release for 9 March 2027. Each will carry its own preliminary quarter, and will revise the two before it. For how the price indexes that once sat beside these figures came to an end, see the price indexes that ended in 2021; for the homes still being added to the stock, building approvals, month by month.