Every suburb in Australia has a price. Price tells you what people paid; it says little about the economic standing of the households who live there. The APN Bedrock™ Score was built to describe that standing. Think of it as an economic profile of a suburb: it looks beneath the sale price at the income, ownership, employment and financial position of the households the area is made of.
The score runs from 0 to 100. A high score means a suburb’s households are well-placed on the measures Bedrock reads: higher incomes, higher rates of home ownership, lower unemployment, less financial stress, and a stronger relative-advantage reading than most of the country. A low score means the opposite: lower incomes, more financial pressure, and greater relative disadvantage.
A low score does not mean a suburb is a bad place to live. It means its households are, on average, in a weaker economic position. That is useful information for anyone making a long-term property decision, but it needs to be read alongside everything else you know about the area.
The index covers 6,782 suburbs and localities nationally. Three examples show the range:
Strong across all five dimensions: household income in the top 3% of localities, more than nine in ten dwellings owned outright or with a mortgage, unemployment of 2.6%, and mortgage repayments taking 19.5% of household income, a lighter burden than in 84% of localities.
Upper tier on every dimension: household income in the top 7%, 87% of dwellings owner-occupied, unemployment of 2.9% and repayments of 19.5% of income. A socio-economic advantage reading of 80.7 places it a step below the top tier.
Low on four of the five dimensions: unemployment of 10.4%, household income in the bottom eighth, 58% of dwellings owner-occupied, and a socio-economic advantage reading in the bottom 3% nationally. Its repayment burden, 24.4% of income, is close to the national middle.
The APN Bedrock™ Score measures not what a suburb is worth today, but the economic position of the households who live there.
When you buy a property, the households around it are part of what you are buying into. Their economic position — incomes, home ownership, employment and financial pressure — describes the economic character of an area, and it can differ sharply between suburbs that look similar on price alone.
The score gives you a single, independent number that captures all of that, derived from public data with no commercial interests behind it. It will not tell you whether prices will go up or down, and it does not predict which residents will stay or leave; no honest tool does. It tells you where a suburb’s households sit, economically, relative to the rest of the country.
The interactive map shows every scored suburb in the country, colour-coded by score. Click any locality to see its overall APN Bedrock™ reading and the five component readings that make it up. Look up your own suburb, or compare the suburbs you are considering. The map is free to use and needs no login.
All scores are derived from the 2021 ABS Census and the 2021 ABS SEIFA release, and describe structural conditions as measured at that point. They are a structural baseline, not a reading of current market conditions. A rebuild on 2026 Census data is planned as the ABS small-area releases become available through 2027.
