Three budget claims, against the tax office's own books

Budget speeches use round numbers and friendly examples. The Australian Taxation Office publishes the actual numbers, postcode by postcode, once a year. The most recent release (Taxation Statistics 2022-23, published 27 June 2025) is the freshest income data the country has at this granularity, and it is two years more current than the Census. Three of the budget's headline claims look different when you read them side by side with the tax office's books. Two are smoothed. One holds. Each section below ends with what it means for an ordinary reader.

1. The "average worker" the Treasurer pictures earns more than the typical taxpayer in 98 per cent of Australian postcodes

The tax-cut factsheet shows the package working through the finances of a worker on $81,245 a year. The factsheet calls this "average earnings". This is technically Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings, a statistic pulled up by high earners. It is not what the typical taxpayer earns.

The tax office knows what the typical taxpayer earns because it sees every tax return. It publishes the median taxable income of every Australian postcode, every year. The 2022-23 figures (published 27 June 2025, covering the income year ending 30 June 2023) cover 2,565 postcodes and 15.9 million individual taxpayers.¹

Postcodes where the typical taxpayer earned $81,245 or more (2022-23)

51 of 2,565 (2.0%)

Postcodes where the typical taxpayer earned less than $81,245

2,514

Taxpayers living in those below-$81,245 postcodes

15.68 of 15.95 million (98.3%)

The 51 postcodes where the typical taxpayer is at or above the case study split into two clusters. About twenty are single-industry mining or remote-service towns: the Pilbara (Pannawonica, Telfer, Newman, Tom Price, Wickham, Roebourne, Karratha, Port Hedland, Onslow, Marble Bar), the WA Goldfields (Leonora), Roxby Downs in South Australia, the Queensland Bowen Basin coal belt (Moranbah, Dysart, Blackwater, Coppabella, Glenden), Weipa, Christmas Island, and three Northern Territory remote postcodes. The other thirty-or-so are urban wealth pockets, heavily concentrated in Sydney's eastern suburbs, inner west, and lower North Shore (Mosman, Neutral Bay, Cremorne, Kirribilli, Double Bay, Darling Point, Point Piper, Bellevue Hill, Vaucluse, Paddington, Woollahra, Balmain, Rozelle, Leichhardt, Erskineville, Alexandria), plus inner Canberra (Yarralumla, Forrest, Kingston) and Perth's western strip (Cottesloe, Peppermint Grove, City Beach). Together they hold 269,000 of the country's 15.95 million taxpayers.²

For every Australian outside the WA mining belt and a small number of inner-city addresses, the worker in the Treasurer's case study earns more than the typical taxpayer in their suburb. The annual tax cut of $2,816 attributed to that worker, by 2027-28, is the maximum benefit any single tax-filer can take from the cuts. Most workers will take less, because they earn less.

2. The negative gearing reform tips one investor in 300 a year

The Government's modelling says the negative gearing and capital gains tax reform will produce 75,000 extra owner-occupiers over the next decade. The Treasurer cites that figure as a measure of how much the package helps first-home buyers. Seventy-five thousand homes sounds significant. It is worth knowing what it is being compared against.

The tax office, in the same release, records that 2,214,866 Australians had a rental property on their tax return in 2022-23. Of those, 1,586,111 rental property arrangements were in loss position, which is what "negative gearing" means in practice: a landlord whose costs exceed the rent they collect, and who claims the loss against their other income.³

Existing rental property investors (2022-23)

2,214,866

Rental arrangements in loss position (negative gearing)

1,586,111

Budget reform target (additional owner-occupiers over a decade)

75,000 (~7,500/yr)

Share of existing investor pool shifted

0.34% per year (~1 in 300)

The reform changes the tax setting that determines who can profitably hold an investment property. The budget's modelled consequence is that 7,500 properties a year switch from being bought by an investor to being bought by an owner-occupier. That is a marginal shift. Against a pool of 2.21 million existing investors, it represents about 0.34 per cent a year, or one investor in roughly 300.

Where do those investors actually live? The tax office publishes rental property counts at the postcode level. The ten postcodes with the most individual investors in the country, 2022-23:

Nine of the ten largest investor postcodes have an average investor losing money on the rental, ranging from a small loss of $619 in Liverpool to $5,452 in Hoppers Crossing. Werribee, Hoppers Crossing, Craigieburn, Cranbourne and Beaumont Hills are family suburbs in outer Melbourne and the Sydney Hills district, where the median taxpayer earns between $48,000 and $71,000 a year. Toowoomba is the one exception in the top ten: its average investor turned a $2,108 profit. Across the nine loss-making postcodes, those losses are claimed against the investor's salary as a deduction. That is what the negative-gearing tax setting actually does in volume terms.

3. The fuel excise cut, by contrast, adds up

Not every budget claim is window-washed. The fuel excise reduction is presented as a $3.8 billion receipts decrease over the five years from 2025-26. The tax office's own excise volumes let us check the working.⁴

The figure the budget paper gives is $3.8 billion. The independent arithmetic, using only the tax office's own fuel volumes from the most recent year, lands within $20 million of the budget's number. The fuel excise math is honest. Credit where it is due.

That does not say the cut is good policy. (Who actually gets those $3.82 billion worth of cents-per-litre, postcode by postcode, is the subject of the companion finding; the answer is unevenly.) It says the headline number is not smoothed. The arithmetic matches the underlying volumes.

So what should you take from this?

Budget speeches use friendly examples and round numbers because they are quick to read. The examples are not random. They are chosen to show each policy at its most flattering. The worker on $81,245 takes the biggest tax cut. "75,000 homes" sounds bigger than "one in three hundred investors". The fuel cut's deficit cost happens to be accurate because the volumes the tax office records did not allow it to be otherwise.

Three takeaways for the ordinary reader of any budget, this one or the next:

1. When a politician puts a person in an example, ask which statistic that person represents. "Average earnings" is a mean. The middle taxpayer in your suburb is a median. The two are not the same number, and the budget speech almost always picks the one that flatters the cut.
2. When a policy is described by an absolute number, ask "out of how many?". 75,000 households is a real number. 75,000 against 2.21 million existing investors is a much smaller number, and the same fact. The denominator is usually missing from the budget speech.
3. When a budget cost is stated as a headline figure, the underlying volumes are usually public. The fuel cut's $3.8 billion reconciles to ATO petrol and diesel volumes. The math is reproducible by anyone willing to open one spreadsheet.

The data the budget rests on is, almost without exception, public and free. The reason articles rarely read the budget against it is that nobody has the time to find the right table inside the news cycle. That is auscyclopedia's job, not yours. The figures here will be updated as the tax office releases each new year of Taxation Statistics.

Sources

1. Australian Taxation Office, Taxation Statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 25 (count, average and median by postcode) and Table 8 (median and average taxable income by state and postcode). Released through data.gov.au on 27 June 2025, dataset taxation-statistics-2022-23, CC-BY 3.0 AU. Covers the 2022-23 income year (1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023).
2. Same source as note 1, ordered by 2022-23 median taxable income descending. Postcode-to-suburb names are verified against Australia Post listings and the Australian Bureau of Statistics postal-area boundaries.
3. Australian Taxation Office, Taxation Statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 25 (count of taxpayers with net rent by postcode) and Table 26 (rental property schedules by state and net rent position, 2012-13 to 2022-23). The 75,000-owner-occupier projection is recorded in Budget Paper No. 2, "Tax Reform – Boosting Home Ownership – reforming negative gearing and capital gains tax", and the Budget Overview at page 24.
4. Australian Taxation Office, Taxation Statistics 2022-23, Excise Table 1 (excisable products and excise liabilities, 2003-04 to 2023-24 financial years). Budget Paper No. 2, "Taking Pressure Off Australians – temporary reduction of fuel excise and heavy vehicle road user charge", page 16.

Methodology

Every figure here is from the Australian Taxation Office's Taxation Statistics 2022-23 release, published 27 June 2025, free to download from data.gov.au under Creative Commons Attribution. The case-study earnings figure is from the Treasurer's new tax cuts factsheet, May 2026. The budget cost figures are from Budget Paper No. 2.

Median individual taxable income at the postcode level is not the same statistic as the average earnings figure on the case-study factsheet. The former is the middle taxpayer's reported income; the latter is the average of full-time adult ordinary-time earnings. The comparison made in this finding is: when the Treasurer's example uses the average-earnings figure as the face of the cut, how many postcodes have a typical (median) taxpayer at or above that figure? The answer is two per cent. The comparison is between the case study figure and the lived experience of taxpayers in each postcode, which is what readers will infer the case study is meant to represent.

First published 12 May 2026. The next ATO release (Taxation Statistics 2023-24) is expected in mid-2026 and will refresh these figures by one income year.