ABS - Personal Income - Total Income (SA2) 2011-2018

This dataset presents information about total income. The data covers the financial years 2011-12 to 2017-18, and is based on Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) according to the 2016 edition of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS).

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

Government pensions, benefits or allowances are excluded from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (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 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.

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.

Please note:

• 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.

• Totals may not align with the sum of their components due to missing or unpublished information in the underlying data and perturbation.

For further information please visit the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

AURIN has made the following changes to the original data:

• Spatially enabled the original data.

• Set 'np' (not published to protect the confidentiality of individuals or businesses) values to Null.