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As noted in What is a Family?, couple families are based around a couple relationship between two people who are either married or in a de facto partnership and usually resident in the same household. It includes couples with or without dependants, and same-sex partners.
In June 2015, there were:
2.5 million opposite sex couple families with dependants (up from 2.4 million in 2012)
3 million opposite sex couple families without dependants (up from 2.9 million in 2012)
48,000 same-sex couple families (up from 39,400 in 2012). (Table 1)
Annotation(s): *Couple families without dependants, but with children 15 years or over
Footnote(s): Does not include persons with undetermined labour force status.
The proportion of couple families with dependants in which one or both parents were employed was 94% in June 2015. The majority of couple families with dependants had both parents employed (64%), of which 1.3 million had at least one child aged less than 15 years. (Tables 1, 3)
There were 452,500 couple families which had youngest dependent aged 15–24 years living with them. (Table 8) In 2015, the mother was employed in 60% of all couple families with dependants. The percentage of mothers employed full-time in couple families increased with the age of the youngest dependant, from 23% for mothers of 0–4 year olds to 44% of mothers of dependants aged 15–24 years. In 46% of couple families with dependants, the mother was employed part-time. (Table 7)
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