Melbourne has quietly overtaken Sydney to become Australia’s most populous city, thanks to a slight tweak to where a geographical boundary is drawn.
(Bloomberg) — Melbourne has quietly overtaken Sydney to become Australia’s most populous city, thanks to a slight tweak to where a geographical boundary is drawn.
The city overtook its northern rival on a technicality after the Australian Bureau of Statistics added a new district to its ‘significant urban area’ population measure. That showed Melbourne was home to 4.88 million people in 2021 — 18,700 more than Sydney — following the inclusion of the area of Melton.
When calculated via the updated measure, Melbourne has been the larger city since 2018. However, when using the traditional larger ‘greater capital city’ metric, Sydney was still ahead by a margin of 283,600 in 2021. Melbourne is forecast to overtake the harbor city around the start of the next decade when using that measure.
Melbourne, which is famous for its coffee culture and cooler climate, was ranked as Australia’s most liveable city and 10th in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index for 2022.
It’s also a more affordable place to live, with the median home value of A$747,322 ($501,901) compared with more than A$1 million in Sydney.
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