Public Housing Waitlist — Methodology and Sources
What this measures
Victorian public housing applicants on the waiting list at 30 June each year, excluding applicants for internal transfer. Lower is better.
The number nearly doubled from 34,464 at 30 June 2015 to 56,230 at 30 June 2025, despite the Big Housing Build program adding new social housing stock over the same period.
How values are derived
The Productivity Commission's annual Report on Government Services (ROGS) publishes a national, methodology-consistent series of applicants on each state's public housing waiting list in Table 18A.5, sourced from the AIHW National Housing Assistance Data Repository. Each ROGS release covers a rolling 5-year window, so the long series here is stitched from four releases (overlapping years match exactly across releases):
| Year-end (30 June) | Vic applicants | ROGS release |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 34,464 | 2019 |
| 2016 | 31,764 | 2019 |
| 2017 | 35,381 | 2019 |
| 2018 | 38,185 | 2019 |
| 2019 | 42,832 | 2020 |
| 2020 | 45,719 | 2021 |
| 2021 | 51,859 | 2026 |
| 2022 | 54,857 | 2026 |
| 2023 | 53,956 | 2026 |
| 2024 | 51,380 | 2026 |
| 2025 | 56,230 | 2026 |
(Year labels on the chart are financial years — "2014-15" denotes the snapshot at the end of FY 2014-15, i.e. 30 June 2015.)
Why ROGS rather than DFFH directly
The Victorian Housing Register was established in 2016 by unifying the previous public-housing and community-housing waiting lists. DFFH publishes the live VHR snapshot, but only the most recent few quarters are available on the Homes Victoria website. The DFFH Annual Report doesn't publish the year-end total. ROGS provides the only consistent, audited long-run series — and uses the same "public housing applicants at 30 June" definition both before and after the VHR was introduced.
Caveats
- Captures public housing applicants only. The full VHR also includes a community-housing track (recent Homes Vic data shows ~57k total VHR applicants vs. the ~56k ROGS public-housing figure for the same date). Trends are very similar.
- The 2016 VHR launch unified two previously separate lists. Pre-2016 ROGS values reflect the predecessor public-housing register; the measurement basis is consistent, but the institutional structure changed.
- A single 'applicant' is a household, not a person.
- A waitlist of N does not mean N people are homeless — many are in unstable accommodation, with family, or in private rentals they want to leave.
Sources
- Productivity Commission — Report on Government Services 2026, Chapter 18 Housing
- ROGS 2026 housing data table CSV
- Homes Victoria — Applications on the Victorian Housing Register (latest quarterly snapshots; not used for the historical series)