Australia’s housing landscape is shifting. While most households still own their home either with or without a mortgage, renting is on the rise.
We’re gradually moving from a three-tenure system - owning a home outright, owning a home with a mortgage, and renting - to a two-tenure one, where the dominant bloc is either mortgage and rent.
With affordability at historic low levels and renting on the rise, some ask will we soon become a nation of majority renters?
The short answer is not anytime soon. Australia is becoming a mortgage or rent nation as we age, but on current trends a majority renter nation is a next century prospect.
The likelihood of owning a home in your 20s and 30s has fallen for each successive generation.
In 2021, just 55% of Millennials (aged 25-39) were homeowners (owned outright or with a mortgage), compared with 62% of Gen X in 2006 and almost 66% of Baby Boomers at the same age in 1991.
Using ABS Census tenure by age data from 2006–2021, we applied a quasi-longitudinal approach tracking how ownership rates change as each age cohort gets older and projecting those same step-ups forward. The model rolls these cohort gains through the population, showing how today’s renter heavy younger cohorts age and move through the system based on current trends.
The result show that the renter share rises steadily through the 2030s–2050s, while the share of outright owners declines, and more Australians remain mortgagors for longer.
Many of the same life milestones that used to help people buy a home like getting a stable job, pairing up, and starting a family still exist. But now they play out in a very different housing landscape, it takes longer to save a deposit, people stay in the rental market for more years, and even after buying they tend to pay off their mortgage more slowly.
Within each age cohort, the rate of homeownership still tends to rise with age, but later and more slowly than it used to. Across cohorts, today’s young Aussie’s start adulthood with lower ownership rates than earlier generations did at the same age and may never catch up to where older cohorts ended up.
By 2050, over one third of Australians will be aged 55 or older. Ageing itself keeps the national ownership rate higher, because older Australians are more likely to own, meaning the national average is pulled toward older ages, supporting the overall owner share and keeping the national ownership rate higher than headline youth snapshots imply.
That’s why the overall picture remains majority owner, even as younger generations spend longer renting.
In short, Australia is undergoing a shift toward a mortgage or rent mix where most people either rent or carry a mortgage, even as ageing keeps ownership above 50% nationally.
The modelling shows renters would not exceed 50% of the population until well after 2100. By mid-century the renter share sits around 36%, rising to about 40% by 2100.
Renting is nonetheless spreading across more life stages and no longer a brief stop in your 20s.
Since 2006, renting has increased in every age band, especially among people in their 30s and 40s, and older Australians now make up a larger share of renters.
The clearest signal of change is among 30-39 year olds, where the renter share is up more than 8 percentage points since 2006. These shifts reflect later family formation and higher deposit hurdles some of the key frictions slowing the move into ownership.
Even testing tougher assumptions like high migration, faster renter growth, and weaker step-ups into homeownership, the renter share keeps rising, but remains below a majority through the 21st century.
At the 2021 Census, owners with a mortgage already outnumbered outright owners.
And the quasi-longitudinal analysis implies this mortgage and rent bloc became the dominant tenure from around 2024 and will remain so for decades to come.
This is partly because the transition from “mortgage” to “owned outright” is slowing. People are buying later, taking out bigger loans, and repaying more slowly.
Boomers at age 25–39 were roughly three times more likely to own outright than Millennials at the same age.
And also because fewer people ever buy, a growing share will rent for life, lifting the combined mortgage or rent share of the population.
Australia is moving from a pattern where most people owned their home outright by retirement, to one where many still have a mortgage or never buy at all. Even though we’re likely to see more people renting for life, Australia isn’t on track to become a nation of mostly renters any time soon.
For that to happen, there would have to be a trend break that permanently delays younger generations or stops them moving into home ownership altogether.
A growing cohort of long-term and even forever renters means policy must recognise that renting now spans more life stages than ever.
We can’t assume renters will simply move from one short-term lease to another - policy needs to lift security, quality, and fairness in the rental market. Further, the relative disadvantage of not having wealth accumulation will be a societal challenge.
Meanwhile the centre of gravity has shifted to mortgage or rent.
This shift is deepening both inter-generational and intra-generational divides. Between generations, when deposits rise faster than incomes, younger Australians buy later and carry debt longer. Within generations, chances of owning a home depend much more on income and family wealth than in the past. The poorest Aussie’s within each cohort and those without help from parents or inheritance are being locked out.
If policymakers can make it easier to build homes, speed up supply, and keep the housing market more stable and inclusive, people will still make the leap from renting to owning over time, just later and more slowly than previous generations.
The challenge is to make both sides of the housing market fairer, ensuring long-term renters have security, while giving aspiring buyers a clearer path to ownership.
