Tenancy Disputes and Bonds: What Each State Reports

Where tenancy disputes go

A dispute between a tenant and a landlord goes to a different body in each jurisdiction. Six use a civil and administrative tribunal, and Queensland first asks the parties to try conciliation at its bond authority, the Residential Tenancies Authority (RTA), before a matter can go to the tribunal. Western Australia and Tasmania hear tenancy matters in the Magistrates Court. Each body reports on its own financial year and counts its own unit: applications, cases finalised, proceedings commenced, or disputes conciliated. Some include applications about bonds and some handle bonds through a separate process.

Source: annual reports of each body, as listed under Sources. Each row counts something different, so the figures are not comparable across rows and are not ranked or added.

For those reasons the figures in the table cannot be added into a national total, and they cannot be ranked or turned into rates per renting household. A national count of tenancy disputes is NIL RETURN. The rules the disputes arise under are compared in Tenancy Law Across the States: Bonds, Rent Increases and Notice in Eight Acts.

Five years of volumes

Four bodies publish five-year tables, which show how their own caseloads have moved.

Source: RTA Annual Report 2024–25; Magistrates Court of Western Australia, Report on Civil Cases 2018/19 to 2022/23; ACAT Annual Review 2023–24, Tables 29 and 31; NTCAT Annual Report 2023–24, Table 1. Financial years; each row is on its own basis.

In Queensland, disputes conciliated by the RTA rose in each year from 19,733 in 2021–22 to 23,408 in 2024–25. In 2024–25, 3,356 conciliated disputes went on to the tribunal, 14.3% of the total. In Western Australia, residential tenancy lodgements in the Magistrates Court fell from 14,020 in 2018–19 to 7,447 in 2022–23, the latest year in the report used, a fall of 47%. The ACT tribunal’s tenancy applications rose every year from 2019–20 to 2023–24, from 936 to 1,302, while the average time to finalise one stayed between 55 and 70 days. The NT tribunal commenced 598 tenancy proceedings in 2023–24.

NSW and Victoria publish one year at a time. The NSW tribunal received 28,193 Tenancy List applications and 12,900 Social Housing List applications in 2024–25. Victoria’s tribunal received 51,092 residential tenancy applications in 2023–24, of 79,386 new applications in all, and finalised 64,428 tenancy cases with a median of seven weeks.

What disputes are about: the ACT

Only the ACT tribunal publishes its tenancy applications by type.

Applications for termination and possession, the orders that end a tenancy and return the property, were the largest group at 308, up 20% on the previous year. Landlords’ applications for access to inspect a property were next at 207, up 16%. Disputes over rent increases were few: three applications by landlords and eight by tenants seeking a review. The tribunal’s registrar issued 55 warrants for eviction in the year. The tribunal’s total of 1,302 applications also includes rental bond referrals, which the type table does not list.

Bonds: who gets the money back

Bonds are where the published data is fullest. NSW Fair Trading publishes every bond it refunds, one line each, with the amount paid to the tenant and to the landlord or agent.

APN calculation based on NSW Fair Trading data: Residential rental bond refunds, annual and quarterly files, 2021 to June 2026. One line per refund paid by Fair Trading; days held is the time Fair Trading held the bond.

In each year from 2021 to the first half of 2026, between 61.6% and 62.7% of bonds went back to the tenant in full, and between 13.3% and 14.0% went wholly to the landlord or agent. The rest were split. Tenants received between 80.3% and 81.1% of the money refunded. In 2025 that left $157 million paid to landlords and agents. The median bond had been held for 563 days when it was refunded, and Fair Trading held 980,458 bonds at December 2025, up from 930,787 four years earlier.

Victoria and Queensland report the same outcome in their own terms. Victoria’s Residential Tenancies Bond Authority repaid 249,891 bonds in 2024–25: 65% in full to the renter, 10% in full to the rental provider, and the rest split. Four per cent of repayments were made at the direction of VCAT or a court. Queensland’s RTA reports that tenants received an average of 75.2% of their bond in 2024–25 and that 57.6% received all of it. Each measure is defined by its own authority, so these figures describe each state, not a ranking between them.

In Queensland, 16,069 of the 227,616 bond refunds in 2024–25 went through the RTA’s dispute resolution process, 7.1%. The number of refunds fell every year from 267,098 in 2020–21.

Enforcement and rent increases

Two states report enforcement of tenancy law in numbers, and only Queensland over several years. Queensland’s RTA finalised 600 investigations in 2024–25 and issued a penalty infringement notice for 28 offences. It began counting proactive investigations in 2022–23, so earlier years are not directly comparable. Consumer Affairs Victoria reported its renting taskforce’s work in 2024–25: 1,523 rental property cases assessed, 89 infringement notices, fines of $706,004 and five court proceedings. The other reports reviewed here give no regular series of enforcement figures.

Apart from the ACT’s application counts above, Victoria is the only jurisdiction among those reviewed here that publishes a series on rent increases. Renters can ask Consumer Affairs Victoria to assess an increase they consider excessive, and it received 5,448, 7,469 and 5,442 such applications in 2022–23, 2023–24 and 2024–25.

What these reports do not show

No jurisdiction publishes how its tenancy disputes end: how many termination orders are made or refused, or how much compensation is awarded. A count of applications says how often the system is used, not who succeeds. Volumes also move with the number of tenancies and with each body’s own procedures, such as Queensland’s conciliation step. A bond paid to a landlord is not in itself evidence of a dispute; it may reflect rent owed or damage both parties agreed. South Australia’s and Tasmania’s figures are not included here, and the reporting years differ, from 2022–23 in Western Australia to 2024–25 in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. This article draws no conclusion about whether any state’s law or system works better than another’s.

Findings are presented on the basis of data and evidence alone.