About Live in Brisbane

It is a one-person project. If something looks wrong, or a figure is out of date, tell me and I’ll fix it.

Live in Brisbane combines open government data (ABS, RTA, Queensland Police, Brisbane City Council, TransLink and Queensland Open Data) with OpenStreetMap. Figures, comparisons and rankings are calculated in code from those sources, and each section names its source and the period its data covers. Some short summaries are generated automatically from the same data. They aren’t first-hand reviews. I’m Kenneth, a Brisbane local, and I check the data and fix errors when readers report them.

Every figure in the site’s data sections is a published open dataset, credited on the page it appears on. One thing on the site is not a published figure: the moving cost calculator uses editorial rate estimates. Nothing in the data sections is modelled or filled in: when a suburb is missing a dataset, that section of its page says so, or is left out, rather than shown with a placeholder.

Every chart is paired with a plain-language summary sentence and a collapsible data table, so the underlying numbers are always legible — not just the picture. Vintages differ by dataset (population is annual, the Census and SEIFA are five-yearly), and each section names its source and the period its figures cover.

Also not yet covered: NBN availability and DA (development-application) data. Named here rather than left out, so it’s clear what the site does and doesn’t include today.

Every ranking is computed in code from the sources above, with no judgement calls and no written-by-hand verdicts. Each page names the single measure it ranks on, and the short explanations under it (what is driving the top three, and any caveats) are built from the same stored figures.

Suburbs with fewer than 500 usual residents are left out of every ranking, as are suburbs missing two or more of the core datasets (rent, population, schools and shops, Census income), because a median or a percentage on a handful of people or a thin sample is noise. Where an earlier period exists, the ranking shows how each suburb’s position has moved against it; it is left off when too few suburbs have an earlier figure to compare fairly.

Data is ingested on a schedule by automated jobs, never live. The ABS releases that feed the site are quarterly or annual, so the site is refreshed on that cadence rather than continuously. The most recent refresh was 9 October 2026.

Because freshness matters more than immediacy here, every suburb, ranking and cost-of-living page carries a “figures current to” line so you can see exactly how old the numbers are — and the “Updated” column in the table above gives the real last-refresh date for each source, not just how often it’s supposed to change.

Some of the site’s figures are exact matches to a suburb; others are the closest honest approximation the underlying data allows. Both kinds are shown — the difference is stated, not hidden:

• 2016 “then and now” comparisons are mapped onto 2021 SA2 boundaries via the ABS Time Series Profile, so they’re approximate wherever a boundary changed between Censuses.
• Reported-offence data is published at police-division level — a catchment covering several suburbs — not at suburb level. We map divisions to suburbs with a curated table and never fabricate a suburb-level figure.
• Council flood-likelihood polygons aren’t clipped to any boundary, so we lay a grid over each suburb and sample it — an approximation, not a per-property lookup — and it covers the Brisbane City Council area only.
• RTA rents are reported by postal locality name, matched to ABS SA2 suburbs; where one locality spans several suburbs, or several localities collapse into one suburb, the medians are combined.
• OpenStreetMap amenity counts (cafés, restaurants, pubs and bars, gyms, GPs) can undercount a real but less-mapped area. Below a set threshold we don’t print a small count as if it were reliable — the page says the category isn’t well mapped instead, with a link to check OpenStreetMap directly.
• Every suburb page is drawn to an ABS SA2 statistical-area boundary (Australian Statistical Geography Standard, Edition 3, 2021), not the gazetted suburb boundary a resident would recognise. The two are a close match across most of Greater Brisbane but can differ, particularly in newer growth corridors.
• HTAG property price estimates, NBN availability and development-application (DA) data aren’t ingested yet.

Each licence is linked against its source in the table above. In short: ABS, Queensland Government, Residential Tenancies Authority, Queensland Police Service and Brisbane City Council data is used under CC BY 4.0; OpenStreetMap data under the ODbL. Live in Brisbane is an independent project and is not affiliated with the ABS, ACARA, the Queensland Government, the Residential Tenancies Authority, the Queensland Police Service or Brisbane City Council.

Questions, corrections or a suburb you’d like covered: use the contact form.