July Rental Pulse: National Rents Touch $650 While Wages Tread Water

I have just finished crunching the July 2025 update of our national Rent Index, and the headline number is impossible to miss. The median advertised rent across Australia now sits at $650 per week, taking the national index to 175.7. In plain terms, typical rents are almost 76 percent higher than at the start of 2011, while the national wage index has lifted only 43 percent in the same window. The gap between what landlords charge and what workers earn has never been wider in the dataset I follow.