HILDA 2026: Half of Young Australians Live at Home — What It Means for Fijians There

Half of Australians aged 18 to 29 were still living in the family home in 2024, according to the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, Australia’s largest long-running study of household life. The findings, drawn from data collected between 2001 and 2024 and reported from 23 September 2026, also record the highest rate of housing stress among lower-income households since the study began, according to CathNews, citing the Sydney Morning Herald.

That matters in Suva as well as Sydney. Australia is the single largest destination for Fijians who leave to work, and the household budgets HILDA measures are the same budgets that send money home. This report, however, does not measure Fijians. Below, Fiji News sets out every figure with the outlet it came from, adds the Fiji-side context the report itself does not contain, and is explicit about what nobody has published.

Key facts, with sources attached

• Living at home: CathNews, citing the Sydney Morning Herald, puts the share of 18-to-29-year-olds in the family home at 49.9 per cent in 2024, up from 39.4 per cent in 2001. The ABC reports the same finding, rounded, as half, up from 39 per cent.
• Renting: Two-thirds of young adults who had left home were renting privately — the ABC’s summary of the report.
• Young renters in stress: In mainland capital cities, 25.3 per cent of young private renters were in housing stress in 2024, against 17.6 per cent of the equivalent group in 2001. These two figures appear in the summary published by ozarab.media, which attributes them to the HILDA authors.
• Young mortgage holders: Housing stress moved only from 8.6 per cent in 2001 to 9.9 per cent in 2024 — again from the ozarab.media summary of the report.
• Skills mismatch: Half of Australian workers feel over-educated for their job and a quarter feel over-skilled, as reported by the ABC.
• Gender pay: The hourly gender wage gap reached 10.2 per cent in 2024, according to the ABC.

2001 versus 2024, side by side

The Fiji angle: what the report covers, and what it doesn’t

HILDA is a survey of Australian households, and the coverage reviewed for this article contains no Fiji or Pacific breakdown — no country-of-birth split for Fiji-born residents, no remittance data, no separate housing-stress rate for Pacific migrants. Fiji News says so plainly rather than implying otherwise.

The Fiji-side numbers therefore have to come from elsewhere, and they are context we have added, not HILDA findings. Australian Bureau of Statistics census data on country of birth, published in the ABS’s cultural diversity releases, records a Fiji-born population in Australia in the order of tens of thousands — roughly 88,000 people at the 2021 Census on ABS country-of-birth counts, before the temporary and seasonal workforce is counted. On the money side, the Reserve Bank of Fiji’s balance-of-payments reporting has put personal remittance inflows above F$1 billion a year in recent years, with Australia consistently among the largest source countries alongside New Zealand and the United States. Readers should treat both as approximate and check the ABS and RBF releases for the exact current figures; neither is drawn from HILDA.

Put the two together and the read-across is straightforward, and it is our analysis rather than the report’s. Remittances are paid out of discretionary income. HILDA’s central finding, as the ABC frames it, is that stagnant wages and rising housing costs cancelled out the gains from strong employment in 2024. A migrant worker in Sydney or Brisbane who is employed but paying more than 30 per cent of disposable income in rent has less left to send to Ba or Labasa, even in a year when Australian employment looks healthy on paper. That is the mechanism by which an Australian domestic housing statistic becomes a Fijian household income statistic.

Two HILDA findings land closest to the diaspora. First, the ABC reports that being born in a non-English-speaking country and holding a casual contract are each associated with higher probabilities of both over-education and over-skilling — the two labour-market conditions under which qualified migrants earn below what their training should command. On the ABS’s standard classification, Fiji does not sit in the group of “main English-speaking countries” (the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and South Africa), so Fiji-born residents generally fall on the higher-risk side of that split. Second, the housing-stress figures are worst precisely for low-income private renters in mainland capital cities, which is the tenure and location profile of most recent arrivals. Neither point is a Fiji-specific finding; both are categories Fijians disproportionately sit in.

For readers tracking how Australian household conditions feed back into Fiji’s economy more broadly, Fiji News has separately reported on the Fijians in Australia and New Zealand and how they weigh political promises, the $3.7 billion Fiji earns from Australian tourists — money that comes out of the same squeezed household budgets HILDA measures — and the Australian freight and transport costs debate that shapes what Fijian exporters pay to reach that market.

Who runs the survey

HILDA is an annual longitudinal study run by the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research at the University of Melbourne, which publishes the survey and its statistical reports at melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/hilda. It re-interviews the same respondents each year, which is what allows it to track the same people from 2001 to 2024 rather than comparing separate snapshots.

The two secondary sources describe its size differently: the ABC says it follows the same 17,000 people annually, while CathNews says it has tracked the same 9,000 households since 2001. Those are not necessarily in conflict — one counts individuals, the other households — but Fiji News has not reconciled them against the Melbourne Institute’s own documentation and flags the discrepancy rather than picking one. CathNews names the lead author as Dr Inga Lass, with co-authors including Professor Roger Wilkins and Dr Kyle Peyton, and identifies them as being at Melbourne University.

Housing: renters carry the strain

Peyton told the Sydney Morning Herald, as reported by CathNews, that housing costs were a major factor keeping young adults in the family home.

The near-flat trend in mortgage stress among young owners is the quieter finding. Per the ozarab.media summary, the report’s authors argue it suggests mortgage entry has become increasingly restricted to young adults with higher earnings, substantial savings or access to family wealth — in other words, the mortgage numbers look stable because the people who would have struggled never got the loan.

CathNews reports that one in five young people not living with parents said their accommodation had “inadequate comfort”, against one in 25 of those living with parents, and that young renters reported lower satisfaction than those who stayed at home or entered ownership.

Among the bottom 40 per cent of earners in mainland capital cities, CathNews reports, 36 per cent of private renters and 30 per cent of mortgage holders spent more than 30 per cent of disposable income on housing. “Housing stress reached a record high in 2024,” the report says, as published by CathNews, which also reports that nearly 8 per cent were unable to pay the mortgage or rent on time — the highest share since 2003.

Work: over-qualified and over-skilled

The ABC reports that skills mismatches are more common among workers under 25, in occupations such as sales workers and labourers, and in industries such as accommodation and food services — the hospitality and retail sectors that absorb a large share of new migrants.

Mismatches are linked to lower job and life satisfaction and a higher probability of quitting, the ABC reports, with over-skilling generally having the stronger negative effect. Ozarab.media reports Lass said the share reporting over-education was the same as in 2012, which cuts against the idea that the problem is worsening. The report also finds, per the ABC, that jobs requiring bachelor’s or master’s degrees have grown fastest while jobs requiring Year 11 or less have declined — evidence, it argues, that the labour market has broadly kept up with rising education levels.

Education and the group left behind

CathNews, citing the Sydney Morning Herald, reports that well over half of women aged 25 to 44 now hold a university degree compared with 40 per cent of men in that age group, and that women have considerably higher attainment than men in every age group below 65.

The counterpart finding is bleaker. Peyton, quoted by CathNews citing the Sydney Morning Herald, said full-time employment among men aged 25 to 44 who did not complete Year 12 fell from 70 per cent in 2001 to 63 per cent in 2024, while the share outside the labour force altogether rose from 12 per cent to 22 per cent.

Earnings versus costs

Wilkins, quoted by CathNews citing the Sydney Morning Herald, said employment rates have jumped dramatically since 2001, particularly for women, but that earnings are not rising fast enough to keep pace with big increases in housing costs and other non-discretionary spending, leaving the average person under more financial pressure. The ABC’s summary reaches the same conclusion: stagnant wages and rising living costs cancelled out the sense of improvement in employment in 2024.

How we sourced this, and what we could not verify

Fiji News did not obtain the Melbourne Institute report directly. Every HILDA figure above is attributed to the outlet in which we found it — CathNews (citing the Sydney Morning Herald), the ABC, or ozarab.media. Where a number appeared in more than one summary, both are named.

Ozarab.media is a smaller outlet than the ABC or CathNews and we have not independently assessed its editorial standards; it is cited here only for figures and author comments we could not locate in the ABC or CathNews write-ups, and it attributes those to the HILDA authors. Readers relying on the 25.3/17.6 and 8.6/9.9 housing-stress numbers for any serious purpose should confirm them against the Melbourne Institute release.

We have also not verified the discrepancy between the ABC’s 17,000 respondents and CathNews’s 9,000 households, and the Fiji-side context in this article — the ABS Fiji-born population count and the Reserve Bank of Fiji remittance figures — comes from those agencies, not from HILDA. There is, at the time of writing, no published breakdown of housing stress, over-education or living arrangements specific to Fiji-born residents of Australia. Until one exists, the honest position is that HILDA tells us what the environment looks like, not what Fijians in it are experiencing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the HILDA survey count as "housing stress"?

According to CathNews, citing the Sydney Morning Herald, households in the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution that spend more than 30 per cent of disposable income on rent or mortgage payments are counted as being in housing stress. On that measure, CathNews reports, renters, single parents and older singles have the highest rates.

Where can I read the original HILDA report rather than news summaries?

HILDA is run by the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research at the University of Melbourne, which publishes the annual statistical report and its data documentation at melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/hilda. Every figure in this article reached us through secondary coverage — CathNews (citing the Sydney Morning Herald), the ABC and ozarab.media — so readers who need exact definitions, confidence intervals or table numbers should go to the Melbourne Institute release itself.

Does the HILDA survey say anything about Fijians or Pacific migrants in Australia?

No. In the coverage reviewed by Fiji News, the report contains no Fiji-specific or Pacific-specific breakdown. The closest proxies reported are the ABC’s finding that being born in a non-English-speaking country and holding a casual contract are each associated with higher probabilities of over-education and over-skilling, and the housing-stress figures for low-income private renters in mainland capital cities — categories that many Fiji-born workers fall into, but which the report does not disaggregate by country of birth.

Are young Australian men or women more likely to live at home?

CathNews reports that 55 per cent of men aged 18-29 still live in the family home compared with 45 per cent of women. The gender gap has narrowed: young men were 11.9 percentage points more likely than women to live with parents in 2001, falling to 9.6 percentage points by 2024.

Is the same thing happening in the United States?

PYMNTS, citing a Wall Street Journal report, says 49 per cent of American adults under 30 reported living with a parent last year, up from 37 per cent in 2019, based on the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. PYMNTS notes some economists say the true figure is lower because the Fed did not separate children living in parents’ homes from parents living in their children’s homes.

When was the survey data actually collected?

The ABC reports that most of the interviews were conducted between July and October 2024. It notes the consumer price index rose roughly 19.5 per cent between the December quarter of 2019 and the September quarter of 2024, the rent price index rose about 16.8 per cent, and the Reserve Bank of Australia had hiked interest rates rapidly a couple of years earlier.