24600 – APN Net State Position™ (APN NSP™)

The APN Net State Position™ reads the pressure that dwelling prices and state taxation together place on people buying a home: how many years of earnings the average dwelling costs, and how much the states take in transfer duty for each dollar they return to first home buyers. Higher readings mean more pressure.

It is a national time series, the equal-weighted mean of two components, each standardised against its own history. It is one of the five branches of the APN Sovereign Policy Composite Index™ (24800).

Both components enter as they read. The APN Intergenerational Housing-Cost Divergence Index™ (24630) is certified on its own reading but does not yet enter the index: joining it would change the index and is assessed separately.

Both components stand near the top of their histories. The two are related, because duty rises with dwelling prices, and they correlate at 0.40 over 2012–2025; each still carries information the other does not.

At +1.5950σ in the June quarter 2026, the index is at position 96.4. Its highest reading on record came in March 2026, at +1.7556σ. It rose from −1.30σ in September 2012 to +0.71σ in December 2016, fell to −0.95σ in September 2020, when first-home exemptions and pandemic-era grants were at their most generous and price growth had slowed, and rose to +1.38σ in March 2022 as prices and duty climbed.

On final data, the latest reading is +0.9030σ in June 2025, at position 82.1. The step since then reflects the provisional 2025-26 duty figures in the tax-to-subsidy component as well as dwelling prices.

• Provisional reading. The tax-to-subsidy component’s quarters from September 2025 rest on 2025-26 budget estimates, so this index is provisional for those quarters and may move when the actuals are published (about April 2027).
• Partly estimated quarters. The tax-to-subsidy component is collated by financial year and spread across quarters in line with published quarterly figures and ABS lending indicators; each year is exact.
• A third component outside the index. The APN Intergenerational Housing-Cost Divergence Index™ (24630) is certified but does not yet enter the index, which composes on 24610 and 24620.
• Trend. The years-of-earnings component rises over the window, so recent quarters tend to rank high.
• Held earnings. The years-of-earnings component (24610) holds each half-yearly earnings release until the next. The 55 quarters of the 2012–2025 baseline therefore rest on 28 independent earnings releases, May 2012 to November 2025, fewer than the quarter count suggests.