Living in Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia, about 5,435,590 people. What you would earn and keep, the climate month by month, and every open figure we hold, each with its source, period and licence.

Weigh Melbourne against other cities, with your own numbers

Key facts

• Melbourne has about 5,435,590 residents (GeoNames).
• On a gross salary of A$96,000 a year, an employee in Melbourne takes home about A$74,760 a year (A$6,230 a month) after income tax and employee contributions, an effective rate of 22.1% (Australia 2026 rules).
• In Melbourne the average daily high (air temperature in the shade) peaks at 26.2 °C in January and the average daily low falls to 6.5 °C in July (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Melbourne has about 46 nice days a year, days that are dry, mostly clear and feel 18 to 30 °C on average from 8 am to 8 pm, most of them in January (10) (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Between 2021 and 2025 the air in Melbourne reached 41.5 °C at its hottest and −0.9 °C at its coldest (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo).
• It rains or snows (at least 1 mm) on about 127 days a year in Melbourne (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• The shortest day in Melbourne lasts 9 h 32 min and the longest 14 h 47 min (computed from latitude).
• Fine dust (PM2.5) in Melbourne averages 7.9 µg/m³ a year, 1.6 times the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³ (WHO Ambient Air Quality Database v8.0 (2026), World Health Organization, 2024).
• Everyday prices in Australia sit at 94.4 on an index where the United States is 100 (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2025).
• Life expectancy at birth in Australia is 83.1 years (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2024).
• Australia records 0.85 intentional homicides per 100,000 people a year (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2023).
• Besides citizens of Australia, citizens of New Zealand (Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement) can live and work in Melbourne without a visa.

What you would take home

Resident employee, income year 2026-27: income tax with the tax-free threshold and low income tax offset, plus the 2% Medicare levy. Rules for 2026. Sources: ATO: tax rates for Australian residents (2026-27), ATO: low income tax offset, ATO: what is the Medicare levy, ATO: Medicare levy reduction for low-income earners.

• The income year runs 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027; the gross is that year's salary.
• Medicare levy low-income thresholds are the 2025-26 values until the 2026-27 ones are published.
• Assumes private hospital cover: without it, the Medicare levy surcharge (1% to 1.5%) applies above the surcharge threshold.
• Superannuation guarantee is paid by the employer on top of the salary, so it is not deducted; no work-related deductions or HELP repayments.

A month in Melbourne

Assumed: one person, €60,000 gross a year, renting a one-bedroom home, and everyday spending of €1,200 a month in Lisbon scaled by each country's price level. These are the app's defaults; change any of them there.

Who can live and work here freely

• Citizens of Australia.
• Citizens of New Zealand, under Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement). Australian and New Zealand citizens may live and work in each other's country.

Climate

Daylight is computed from latitude: the shortest day lasts 9 h 32 min, the longest 14 h 47 min.

Every figure

No open figure yet for: rent, one bedroom, rent, three bedrooms, your childcare cost, health insurance premium, public swimming pools (official), green urban areas (official), commuting by public transport, commute time, monthly transit pass, road deaths, born abroad, walking or cycling to work. A country-wide figure is marked as such where it stands in for the city.

Compare Melbourne with

• Melbourne vs Dubai
• Melbourne vs San Francisco
• Melbourne vs Singapore
• Melbourne vs Sydney
• Melbourne vs Tokyo

Elsewhere

Sources we link to but do not copy, because their licences forbid it.

• Numbeo: cost of living in Melbourne
• WeatherSpark: year-round weather in Melbourne
• Wikipedia: Melbourne

Credits

• Borgo contributors, from the statutes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• Unicode CLDR territory information. Copyright © 1991-2026 Unicode, Inc. Used under the Unicode License v3 (https://www.unicode.org/license.txt) (Unicode License v3)
• Borgo contributors, from the statutes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• Founders Running Club communities list (facts of presence and links only) (No licence from the publisher: only facts of presence are stored)
• Places, coordinates, populations and time zones from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
• GHS-UCDB R2024A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, CC BY 4.0, doi:10.2905/1a338be6-7eaf-480c-9664-3a8ade88cbcd; Borgo derives the distance from the centre to the urban centre's edge Shores and lakes from Natural Earth (public domain) decide which directions lead on to land. (CC BY 4.0)
• Counts of GitHub profiles by stated location, from GitHub's public user search (counts only, no profile data) (No data licence from the publisher: only total counts are stored, no record about anyone, as its terms allow public, non-personal information in openly published research)
• Borgo contributors, from the labour codes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• Source: Meteostat (meteostat.net) and its data providers (dev.meteostat.net/providers), CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
• The M-Lab NDT Data Set, 2023-01-01–2023-12-31. https://measurementlab.net/tests/ndt (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Public holidays from Nager.Date (date.nager.at), MIT License, Copyright (c) Nager (MIT License)
• Made with Natural Earth (public domain) (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• OECD (2026), Net childcare costs, OECD Tax-Benefit Models, https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/net-childcare-costs.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• OECD (2026), OECD Family Database, PF2.1 Parental leave systems, https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-family-database.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• OECD (2026), OECD Well-being Database (How's Life?), https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/well-being-database.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (https://open-meteo.com/), CC BY 4.0 Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2021-2025. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. (CC BY 4.0)
• OpenAlex (openalex.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• Airports from OurAirports (ourairports.com), public domain (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• Borgo contributors, from official election results and ParlGov party positions (Döring, Huber and Manow, ParlGov 2024 release, CC0) (CC BY 4.0)
• Research Organization Registry (ror.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data (Mapzen, a Linux Foundation project): SRTM and GMTED2010 terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; ETOPO1, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada (Terrain Tiles source terms: public domain (USGS, NOAA) and Open Government Licence – Canada, with attribution)
• Borgo's summary of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (Australian Department of Home Affairs) (Borgo's own summary of the law cited (CC BY 4.0); the official text is cited, not copied)
• World Health Organization, WHO Ambient Air Quality Database (Version 8.0), 2026, accessed 2026-10-27; data provided by the national and regional agencies named in each value's note WHO does not endorse Borgo, its use of these data, or any city ranking built from them. Values are as published by WHO; WHO advises against using the database to rank cities or compare countries directly, because monitoring differs between places. (WHO terms and conditions for data compilations)
• World Bank, World Development Indicators, CC BY 4.0 (underlying sources named in each figure's note: ICP, IMF, UNODC, UN Population Division, WHO, ILO, UNESCO Institute for Statistics) (CC BY 4.0)
• World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators, Control of Corruption estimate, CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Cite this page

Borgo, “Living in Melbourne”, https://borgo.abcastor.com/city/melbourne-au/, figures as of 2026-11-05. Please also name the original source of any figure you use; each is listed above with its licence. Data: melbourne-au.json.