Personal Income in Australia methodology

The statistics in this release are compiled from the Linked Employer Employee Dataset (LEED), a cross-sectional database based on administrative data from the Australian taxation system.

The LEED includes more than 120 million tax records over seven consecutive years between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics acknowledges the continuing support of the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

All persons who interacted with the Australian taxation system for the 2011-12 to 2017-18 financial years and for whom personal income is identified.

This includes persons who have lodged Individual Tax Returns (ITR) within 16 months of the end of the financial year or who received Pay As You Go (PAYG) payment summaries from an employer in that year.

Statistics are provided for over 2,000 regions, at the SA2, SA3, SA4, LGA and GCCSA levels. Aggregate statistics are available by state and territory and national estimates.

The geographic boundaries have been updated to align with the latest ASGS. The seven year time series of data are all produced on the same boundaries for ease of comparability across years.

All geographic variables are based on the individual's residential address as stipulated on the income tax return, or for non-lodgers, the address listed on the payment summary.

Further information, including access to Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) boundaries, which underpin the data presented in this release, can be accessed from the ABS Statistical Geography Portal on the ABS website.

Over 12 to 14 million persons each year.

The high number of records in the LEED (over 120 million over seven years) enables Personal Income in Australia to provide data at a national, state and regional level.

The statistics in this release are produced from the LEED, using ATO administrative data.

This release, Personal Income in Australia (previously known as Estimates of Personal Income for Small Areas), has been renamed to better align with the Jobs in Australia release, as both releases are now produced from the LEED.

Data from 2010-11 are not released in this issue, as it is not included on the LEED. These data are available in previous editions of Estimates of Personal Income for Small Areas.

Data for previous years have not been revised, except to update to the latest ASGS. The latest edition of ASGS contains updates to the Local Government Areas from 2017 to 2018. These changes result in some LGAs being renamed. No boundaries have changed.

Occupation has been omitted from this release, as it is available from Jobs in Australia and Microdata: Jobs in Australia (to be updated in early 2021).

Other territories have been excluded from release in the download tables. The data for these persons are included in the Australia total.

Using the LEED has allowed data for some areas to be released which were not available in previous editions of this release. These data are currently only available for 2017-18.

Substantial quality improvements of industry information for OMUEs have been made to the 2017-18 data in relation to previous years. Any comparison of OMUEs across time by industry should be conducted with caution.

For details, see Explanatory Note on Employed persons and their status in employment in Jobs in Australia methodology, 2011-12 to 2017-18.

All monetary values are presented as gross pre-tax dollars, as far as possible. This means they reflect income before deductions and loses, and before any taxation or levies (e.g. the Medicare levy or the temporary budget repair levy) are applied. The amounts shown are nominal, they have not been adjusted for inflation.

The income presented in this release has been categorised into income types, these categories have been devised by the ABS to closely align to ABS definitions of income.

Personal income is provided for the following five categories:

• Employee income
• Own unincorporated business income
• Investment income
• Superannuation income
• Total income
   

Employee income is the total (or gross) income received as a return to labour from an employer or from a person's own incorporated business (when they are employed by this business). The data used in deriving employee income comes from both ITRs and payment summaries (where an individual has not lodged an ITR).

Employee income includes the following data items from the payment summary and /or the ITR:

• Salary or wages
• Allowances, earnings, tips, director's fees
• Employer lump sum payment amount A
• Employer lump sum payment 5 per cent
• Employment termination payments taxable component
• Attributed personal services income
• Employee share schemes total assessable discount
• Total reportable fringe benefit amount
• Reportable employer superannuation contributions
• Exempt foreign employment income
• Other net foreign employment income
   

Own unincorporated business income (or OMUE income) is the profit or loss that accrues to owners of, or partners in, their own unincorporated businesses. Profit or loss is the value of the gross output of the enterprise after the deduction of operating expenses, including reportable superannuation contributions, depreciation and operating costs, but before income tax is taken out. Losses occur when operating expenses are greater than receipts and are treated as negative income.

Own unincorporated business income includes the following data items on the ITR:

• Net income or loss from business primary production
• Net income or loss from business non primary production
• Distribution from trusts primary production
• Net Personal Services Income
• Distribution from partnerships less foreign income non primary production
• Distribution from partnerships primary production
   

These data exclude distributions from trusts for non-primary production activities as this may include aspects of investment income. It also excludes the income of working directors/owners of incorporated businesses who are classified as employees; consequently their income is included under Wage and salary income.

"Net personal services income" does not include income a person received as an employee, making it different from "Attributed personal services income".

Own unincorporated business income is conceptually consistent with OMUE income published in Jobs in Australia.

Investment income includes the following data items on the ITR:

• Gross interest
• Dividends unfranked amount
• Dividends franked amount
• Dividends franking credit
• Share of net income from trusts less net capital gains and foreign income non primary production
• Franked distributions from trusts - non-primary production
• Australian franking credits from a New Zealand company
• Net foreign rent
• Net rent
   

Superannuation income includes the following data items on the ITR:

• Australian annuities and superannuation income streams taxable component taxed element
• Australian annuities and superannuation income streams taxable component untaxed element
• Australian annuities and superannuation income streams lump sum in arrears taxable component taxed element
• Australian annuities and superannuation income streams lump sum in arrears taxable component untaxed element
• Australian superannuation lump sum payments taxed element
• Australian superannuation lump sum payments untaxed element
• Bonuses from life insurance companies and friendly societies
   

A change to legislation relating to superannuation, taking effect from 1 July 2007, meant that people aged 60 years and over who receive superannuation income in the form of a lump sum or income stream (such as a pension) from a taxed source, receive that income tax free. Therefore, if a person has no other income, or their total income is below the tax-free threshold, or any tax payable is mitigated by a tax offset (such as Senior Australian Tax Offset), then this person is not required to lodge a tax return.

Due to such changes, the superannuation statistics (persons, income) included in this release are regarded as partial, subject to under-coverage. A more comprehensive snapshot of superannuation income (at aggregate state/territory level) can be obtained from the ABS Survey of Income and Housing - see Household Income and Wealth, Australia.

Other income comprises income items reported on the individual income tax return that were not allocated to one of the above categories. For example, Other income can include transfer or trust income, controlled foreign company income, net foreign pension and annuity income, and foreign investment and life insurance income.

Other income is not published separately as it does not provide a reliable view of the category. It is included in total income.

Other income includes the following data items on the ITR:

• Foreign source income net foreign pension or annuity (without Undeducted Purchase Price)
• Foreign source income net foreign pension or annuity (with Undeducted Purchase Price)
• Foreign entities controlled foreign company income
• Foreign entities Transferor trust income
• Foreign source income other net foreign source income
• Other income category 1
• Other income category 2
   

Total Income is the sum of all reported income derived from Employee income, Own unincorporated business, Superannuation, Investments and Other income, as defined above. Total income does not include the non-lodger population.

Government pensions, benefits or allowances are excluded from the ABS income data and do not appear in Other income or Total income. Pension recipients can fall below the income threshold that necessitates them lodging a tax return, or they may only receive tax free pensions or allowances. Hence they will be missing from the personal income tax data set. Recent estimates from the ABS Survey of Income and Housing (which records Government pensions and allowances) suggest that this component can account for between 9% to 11% of Total income.

All geographic variables are based on a person’s home address as reported on their ITR form. Addresses are coded to the Australian Statistical Geography Standard.

If a geography variable is missing on the ITR, if possible it is imputed from the individual's most recent PAYG payment summary.

Details of income earners from regions unknown (not stated or indeterminate) or who are lodging returns from overseas are included in the totals shown. Persons living in Other territories are not published separately, but included in the totals. Therefore, the totals in each table may not necessarily be the sum of their components.

The sum of sub state geographies (GCCSA, SA4, SA3, SA2 and LGA) may not equal the state statistics due to some records having inadequate address information to be geocoded. Where a record was unable to be geocoded to an SA2, it has not been included in totals for SA2 through to GCCSA. However, where possible, these records have been included in the State and Territory and Australia totals.

Confidentiality rules have been applied to the statistics to ensure there is no likely risk of individuals in the aggregate statistics presented in this publication. Therefore, the sum of sub-state statistics may also not equal state statistics due to some regions being suppressed through the confidentialising process.

Taken together, the simple measures of income distribution such as mean, median, percentile ratios and income shares can provide an indication of differences in the income distributions of two separate regions. However, none of the simple measures comprise a single statistic that summarises the whole income distribution in a way that directly considers the individual incomes of all regions. In this publication, the Gini coefficient is used to compile a single statistic of inequality by summarising the distribution of income across the population in each region.

The Gini coefficient is provided here for Total income. This is a single statistic that lies between 0 and 1 and is a summary indicator of the degree of inequality in income between members of the tax form lodging population. Values closer to 1 represent greater inequality.

The Gini coefficients shown in this release can be regarded as indicative but not definitive. They should not be directly compared with other ABS published Gini coefficients. The Gini coefficients presented in this release are calculated from gross personal income and not from equivalised disposable income as presented in Household Income and Wealth, Australia. There is also an acknowledged under-coverage of certain income groups in taxation data due to tax exemptions, and people being under the tax free threshold. For instance, persons aged 60 years and over who are mostly dependent on superannuation income and those mostly reliant on government pensions and allowances may be missing from the tax data.

The income source from which a person derives most of their (positive) income. For a stated income type, this measure reflects the proportion of all persons in a region for whom the income type is their main source of income.

If a region is particularly reliant on one source, it may be susceptible to policy or economic changes that affect that income type.

As there are several types of income, the main source may account for less than 50% of total income. Where persons receive exactly the same amount across multiple income types, they have been excluded from the derivation of this indicator. Persons with negative or nil total income have also been excluded.

Individuals may receive income from a number of sources. Also, net income from a specific source may be positive or negative. For example, an individual may have positive income from Employee income yet negative net income from Investments. The number of individuals for each income source includes all persons with either positive or negative net income from that source.

Readers should note that the total number of individuals in receipt of income from at least one source cannot be calculated as the sum of the individuals in each income category, since people can have more than one source of income in any given year. For example, an individual could derive income from multiple sources such as Employee income, Investment income and income from their own unincorporated business and thus contribute to the regional person count in all three income categories.

Are individuals who do not lodge a tax return. However, this population may have income that is in scope of this release. This can include persons who receive an income below certain levels or derive their income from some Commonwealth of Australia Government pension, benefit and allowance payments that are exempt from income tax. Their absence should be taken into consideration when interpreting these statistics.

Because the LEED contains information about jobs sourced from PAYG payment summaries, it is possible to impute income information for non-lodgers who are employees.

Non-lodgers are included in the Employee income category, except where cross-classified with age and sex. Previously, age and sex were unavailable for non-lodgers. Whilst this information is now available for non-lodgers from the LEED, they remain excluded from the following table to ensure consistency with previous results.

Table 4 Employee income by age and sex 2011-12 to 2017-18.

Non-lodgers are excluded from the Total income category in all instances.

Users of these data should note that there may be taxation policy changes that will influence the lodging of tax returns, as well as the amounts declared. One change that impacted the data was the increase of the tax-free threshold of $6,000 to $18,200 for the 2012-13 financial year, this appeared to result in less people needing to lodge a tax return. The ABS encourages users of the data to research policy changes that may impact in the comparability of the data year to year. For more information on taxation policy change, the ATO publishes changes in their Taxation Statistics publications.

Statistics in the Personal Income in Australia release are produced using administrative data sourced from the Australian Taxation Office. The ABS also produces household income and wealth estimates collected directly from households via the Survey of Income and Housing (SIH).

The SIH collects information on sources of income, amounts received and the characteristics of persons aged 15 years and over in private dwellings throughout Australia. Since 2003-04, the SIH has been conducted every two years, with the most recent relevant snapshots being the 2011-12, 2013-14, 2015-16 and 2017-18 income years. Additional SIH estimates of annual income have been produced for the survey gap years up until 2014-15 using previous financial year information collected in each survey. For further information about the concepts, definitions, methodology and estimation procedures used in the SIH, please refer to Survey of Income and Housing, User Guide.

SIH employee income includes all payments received by individuals as a result of their current or former involvement in paid employment. In addition to the regular and recurring cash receipts captured by SIH, employee income also includes non-cash benefits, bonuses, termination payments and payments for irregular overtime. Details of the composition of employee income derived from ATO sources are provided in 'income variables' below.

Table 1 below presents a selection of reasonably comparable income data items, sourced from ATO and the SIH, for 2011-12, 2013-14, 2015-16 and 2017-18.

Differences in collection methodologies, data collection/extraction periods, definitions, scope/coverage etc., can all contribute to variations between PIiA and SIH income data. Also, as mentioned before, SIH presents data for low income households whereas the PIiA series may be missing some individuals with low incomes (for example those earning under the $18,200 tax free threshold) because they may not need to lodge tax returns. Please see the quality declaration in the release for more information about coherence.

Since changes were applied to the reporting of superannuation income in 2007, the SIH estimate is thought to provide a more accurate, complete indication of the level of income derived from Superannuation. However, the SIH estimates only include superannuation pension streams and not superannuation lump sum payments.

All personal income tax statistics included in LEED were provided in de-identified form with no home address or date of birth. Addresses were coded to the ASGS and date of birth was converted to an age at 30 June of the reference year prior to data provision.

To minimise the risk of identifying individuals in aggregate statistics, perturbation has been applied to the statistics in this release. Perturbation involves small random adjustment of the statistics and is considered the most satisfactory technique for avoiding the release of identifiable statistics, while maximising the range of information that can be released. These adjustments have a negligible impact on the underlying pattern of the statistics. Some cells have also been suppressed due to low counts.

For further information about these and other statistics, please contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070.

The statistics in this release are compiled from the Linked Employer Employee Dataset (LEED), a cross-sectional database based on administrative data from the Australian taxation system.

The LEED includes more than 120 million tax records over seven consecutive years between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics acknowledges the continuing support of the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

The LEED includes tax data supplied by the ATO to the ABS under the Taxation Administration Act 1953, which requires that such data is only used for the purpose of administering the Census and Statistics Act 1905. Any discussion of data limitations or weaknesses is in the context of using the data for statistical purposes, and is not related to the ability of the data to support the ATO's core operational requirements.

The tax forms and instructions that are used to collect the underlying tax data used in this release can be found on the ATO website. Information about business registration can be found on the ABR website.

The LEED includes ABR data supplied by the Registrar to the ABS under A New Tax System (Australian Business Number) Act 1999, which requires that such data is only used for the purpose of carrying out functions of the ABS. Any discussion of data limitations or weaknesses is in the context of using the data for statistical purposes, and is not related to the ability of the data to support the ABR’s core operational requirements.

Legislative requirements to ensure privacy and secrecy of these data have been followed. In accordance with the Census and Statistics Act 1905, results have been confidentialised to ensure they are not likely to enable identification of a particular person or organisation. All personal information is handled in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988.

The LEED includes all sources of income, regardless of whether the income provider resides within Australia's economic territory.

The LEED includes data for all persons who either submitted an individual tax return (ITR) or individuals who had a payment summary issued by an employer and then remitted to the ATO. Employees who did not submit a tax return and have not provided their Tax File Number to their employer will not appear in the LEED. Owner managers of unincorporated enterprises (OMUEs) who did not submit an ITR are also excluded.

The ABS receives tax data from the ATO approximately 16 months after the end of the financial year. These data then require processing time to construct the LEED, and the other main data source, the  Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE) to produce a coherent and clean persons dataset. These factors contribute to the longer time period between the end of the reference period and the release of statistics from the LEED than other ABS economic statistics.

The LEED consists of three cross-sectional files, the person file is used to build the statistics presented in this publication. The other files in the LEED are a jobs file and an employer file.

Each person file contains data for all persons who either submitted an ITR or who were identifiable on a payment summary in the reference year. Each record includes de-identified demographic and geographic data, and aggregate income information.

Employed persons may be either employees (including owner manager of incorporated enterprises (OMIEs), OMUEs, or both.

Employees are identified by the presence of aggregate employee income and at least one linked employee job.

Employees who have not submitted an ITR but who have provided their Tax File Number to their employer are imputed from Pay As You Go payment summary data.

OMUEs are identified by the presence of any of the own unincorporated business income types and a linked OMUE job.

Tax lodgers who are not employees or owner managers are included on the person file to support statistical analysis that requires a more complete view of the tax lodger population.

This release forms part of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' ongoing program to increase the range of regional statistics available, particularly through the use of administrative information collected by other government agencies. 

Labour statistics are some of Australia’s most important economic and social statistics. Put simply, they provide information about people and their participation in the labour market, their success in finding employment, their earnings and other benefits, their type of work, their working hours and conditions.

Given the importance of high quality information on the Australian labour market, the ABS produces a broad range of labour statistics, drawn from a wide range of different sources. Some of these sources are very well known, such as the monthly Labour Force Survey, but others are less well known – particularly new collections like the annual Jobs in Australia; the quarterly Labour Account; and the fortnightly Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia.

A simple way of visualising this is to consider that ABS labour statistics are drawn from four key “pillars” of data, each of which is a bit different, but which provide complementary insights into the labour market.

Each of these pillars – the two traditional sources of household and business surveys, and the two more recent pillars of administrative data based statistics and Labour Account - provides important and unique insights to enable Australians to better understand their labour market.

A household survey approaches individual households to complete questions about their individual, family or household circumstances.

The key household survey that provides vital information about Australia’s labour market is the Labour Force Survey, and its related supplementary surveys.

Business surveys collect a broad range of information from businesses, including their performance, financial position or about jobs and employees.

Key business surveys with a labour market focus include Job Vacancies, Employee Earnings and Hours, Average Weekly Earnings and the Wage Price Index.

Administrative data refers to information maintained by governments and other entities that is made available to the ABS for statistical purposes. It includes data used for registrations, transactions and record keeping, usually during the delivery of a service.

The ABS releases employment statistics from the Linked Employer Employee Dataset (LEED), using Australian Tax Office information and ABS data. As a result, the LEED includes more than 120 million tax records over seven consecutive years between 2011-12 and 2017-18, and provides information for Australia, states and territories, and over 2,200 different regions based on a person’s usual residence.

Since April 2020, the ABS commenced releasing the fortnightly Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, using payroll data from businesses with Single Touch Payroll (STP) enabled payroll and accounting software provided to the Australian Taxation Office. These estimates provide near real-time information on weekly changes in the number of payroll jobs and total wages for Australia, states and territories, and Statistical Areas Level 4 and Level 3, also based on a person's usual residence.

The Labour Account brings together data from separate administrative, business, and household sources, adjusting and confronting the various sources until a coherent picture of the labour market is established. It provides data on the number of employed persons, the number of jobs, hours worked and income earned for each industry. It provides the best labour market estimates for the 19 industry divisions each quarter and 86 industries annually.

Often there is only a single statistical data source on the ABS website that will include the information that you are after. However, for many labour market topics it is often the case that the ABS produces multiple statistics, each drawn from a different data source to enable different types of analysis. They provide important, complementary economic and social insights into the labour market, which is large, complex and dynamic.

It is therefore important to be guided by what you are looking to understand about the labour market. Is it to understand a topic where:

• Demographic characteristics are important or it may related to an activity outside of employment? Household surveys are often useful for this.
• Specific employer or payroll information is important? Business surveys are often useful for this.
• Detailed sub-population or geographic information is important? This is usually best sourced from administrative data, or the five-yearly Census.
• A comprehensive ‘best estimate’ of key labour market indicators (based on reconciled information from all of the available data sources) is important? The Labour Account is designed to provide this.
   

For example, in seeking to understand how many people are employed in jobs in Australia, you could use statistics from:

• Monthly Labour Force – which provides a timely indicator on changes in employment, unemployment and underemployment, including analysis by personal characteristics such as sex, age, occupation and employment status.
• The quarterly Labour Account – which is the best source of headline information on employment by industry. It provides an estimate of the number of jobs, hours worked, and associated labour income.
• The annual Jobs in Australia – which provides granular information on all the job relationship for more than 2,200 different regions across Australia. This rich dataset is based on more than 100 million individual records which allow for micro-data analysis of the Australian labour market.
   

Another common example is seeking to understand changes in wages over time, where you could use statistics from:

• Quarterly Wage Price Index - which measures changes in the price of labour in the Australian labour market. In a similar manner to the CPI, the WPI follows price changes in a fixed "basket" of jobs and is therefore not affected by changes in quality and quantity of work.
• The twice yearly Average Weekly Earnings - which provides data on average wages by industry, which provides insights into compositional changes in earnings over time.
• The two yearly Employee Earnings and Hours - which provides detailed data on methods of setting pay, hours paid for and detailed distributional earnings information.
• The annual Characteristics of Employment – which provides earnings by detailed socio-demographic and other characteristics.
• The quarterly Compensation of Employees measure in the National Accounts and quarterly measure of labour income in the Labour Account – which provide aggregate earnings measures.

If the purpose is to monitor short- to medium- term changes in the job market, you could use statistics from: 

• The fortnightly Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia - which provides timely, close to real-time estimates of weekly changes in jobs and wages. It contains data by region, industry, selected person attributes, and size of the employer. 

Below is a list of some of the key labour statistical releases, organised into the pillars.

Labour Force, Australia - Monthly
Labour Force, Australia, Detailed – Monthly
Labour Force, Australia, Detailed, Quarterly
Characteristics of Employment, Australia - Annually
Participation, Job Search and Mobility, Australia – Annually
Education and Work, Australia - Annually
Characteristics of Recent Migrants, Australia - 4 yearly
Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation, Australia – 2 yearly
Retirement and Retirement Intentions, Australia – 2 yearly

Job Vacancies, Australia - Quarterly
Industrial Disputes, Australia - Quarterly
Average Weekly Earnings – 6 monthly
Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia – 2 yearly
Wage Price Index, Australia - Quarterly
Employment and Earnings, Public Sector, Australia - Annually
Australian Industry - Annually
Labour Costs, Australia – 5 yearly

Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia - Fortnightly
Jobs in Australia - Annually
Personal Income in Australia - Annually

Labour Account Australia - Quarterly

The ABS continues to strengthen the suite of labour market statistics, to ensure that Australia can effectively understand how its labour market, economy and society are changing over time and make informed decisions.