The advice most Australians under thirty-five receive on this question is a sentence, not a calculation: rent money is dead money. It is a slogan, and it loses people a great deal of money in both directions — some buy too early in the wrong market, others rent for a decade without ever building the deposit that would have given them a choice.
The calculation itself is not complicated. Over a ten-year horizon you are comparing the money you never get back on each side: on the renting side that is rent, on the buying side it is interest, transfer duty, rates, insurance, maintenance and selling costs. This guide builds that sheet line by line, using official Australian dwelling prices where they exist and telling you plainly which numbers you have to look up for your own state.
And because the deposit is the part that takes years rather than weeks, plenty of people build it with a second income stream — an app like I am Beezy pays for content you view and can be pointed straight at a savings account.
What are you actually comparing over ten years?
Most rent-versus-buy arguments compare the wrong two numbers: monthly rent against a monthly mortgage repayment. Those are not comparable quantities, and the comparison flatters buying every time.
Rent is not the loss, and a repayment is not the gain
A mortgage repayment is part interest and part principal. The principal is savings — it moves money from your account into your equity, and you get it back when you sell. The interest is gone, exactly like rent. So the honest comparison is rent against interest plus everything else that never comes back, not rent against the whole repayment. Run it the sloppy way and buying always wins on paper; run it properly and the answer depends on your city, your horizon and the price you pay.
Unrecoverable costs, on both sides
On the renting side the unrecoverable cost is the rent, plus contents insurance and moving costs, minus nothing. On the buying side it is mortgage interest, transfer duty at purchase, lenders mortgage insurance if your deposit is small, council rates, strata or body corporate levies, building insurance, maintenance, and the agent and legal costs on the way out. Add both columns over ten years and you have a comparison that means something. Everything else — equity, capital growth, the emotional value of owning — sits on top of that base, and should be added consciously rather than assumed.
The horizon is what decides it
Buying carries large one-off costs at each end: duty going in, agent and legal costs going out. Spread over two years, those costs dominate everything. Spread over ten, they become a manageable annual figure. That is why the same purchase can be a bad decision at a three-year horizon and a good one at a twelve-year horizon, with no change in the property or the market. Decide your horizon before you price anything, and be realistic about job moves and family plans rather than optimistic.
Build the ten-year sheet, line by line
This is the simulator. Two columns, ten rows, and every value supplied by you rather than by an article. Fill it in with your own city, your own deposit and your own horizon.
The buying column
Start with the purchase price you are realistically looking at, then add transfer duty from your state revenue office. Estimate ten years of mortgage interest — a lender or the free calculators on Moneysmart, the financial guidance site run by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, will give you a schedule. Add lenders mortgage insurance if your deposit is below the lender's threshold, then annual council rates, strata levies if it is an apartment, building insurance and a maintenance allowance. Finish with the agent commission and legal costs you would pay to sell in year ten.
The renting column
Take your current or expected rent, and grow it across ten years at a rate you choose and can defend. Then add the line that renters almost always forget in their own favour: the deposit you did not spend is invested somewhere, and it earns something. Whatever return you assume, apply it consistently, because the opportunity cost of a deposit sitting in a house rather than in an investment is a genuine part of the comparison — and superannuation is part of this picture too, since an Australian employer must contribute 12 % of an employee's earnings to a superannuation fund under the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992, in the compilation in force since 1 July 2026.
The three numbers only your state can give you
Transfer duty, land tax and first home buyer assistance are set by each state and territory, never nationally. Revenue NSW, the State Revenue Office in Victoria, the Queensland Revenue Office and their counterparts each publish their own scales and their own concessions, and the differences between them run to tens of thousands of dollars on the same purchase price. There is no Australian figure for any of the three, and any article that gives you one is inventing it. Go to your own state revenue office, on the day you are running the numbers.
| Line | Buying column | Renting column |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring housing cost | Mortgage interest over ten years | Rent over ten years, grown at your assumed rate |
| Entry cost | Transfer duty, legal fees, inspections, loan fees | Bond, which you get back, plus moving costs |
| Insurance premium | Lenders mortgage insurance, if the deposit is small | Not applicable |
| Ongoing charges | Council rates, strata levies, building insurance | Contents insurance only |
| Maintenance | Your problem, and it recurs | The owner's problem |
| Exit cost | Agent commission and legal costs on sale | Cleaning and a removalist |
| Opportunity cost | Deposit is locked in the property | Deposit stays invested and earns a return |
Where does the price actually sit in your state?
The starting price is the input that swamps every other line, and this is the one part of the calculation where Australia has a first-class official source.
The official number, and where it comes from
The Australian Bureau of Statistics put the mean price of a residential dwelling at $1,111,100 nationally in the March quarter of 2026, up $22,300 over the quarter, across a stock of 11,495,200 dwellings, in a release published on 9 June 2026. That is a mean across every dwelling type and every location, which makes it a benchmark rather than a shopping list. Use it to sanity-check what you are being shown, not to price a specific street.
A gap of 2.2 between the most and least expensive jurisdictions
The same release ranges from $597,300 in the Northern Territory to $1,324,800 in New South Wales, a ratio of 2.2 between the cheapest and the most expensive jurisdiction. There is no Australian house price, and a rent-versus-buy answer computed in one state does not transfer to another. Queensland at $1,123,700 now sits above the national mean, which is a change of some substance for anyone who last looked at this market a few years ago.
Portal estimates are not official data
Property search here runs through two portals, realestate.com.au and Domain, and both display automated valuation estimates. Those estimates are commercial products, not statistics. Use the portals for what they are excellent at — finding listings and seeing what actually sells — and use the Bureau of Statistics for the numbers that go into your sheet. Mixing the two sources is how people end up with a spreadsheet that looks precise and is not.
Building the deposit with I am Beezy
For most people the ten-year calculation is theoretical until the deposit exists. That is the real bottleneck, and it responds to consistency more than to income.
A daily amount pointed at one account
With I am Beezy you view content — videos, articles, advertising — and each view generates earnings paid to your local payment method. The reference range is 5 to 15 euros a day, which at the European Central Bank reference rate of 1 EUR to 1.6385 AUD on 5 August 2026 comes to about A$8 to A$25 a day. Sent automatically into a dedicated savings account rather than into the everyday one, that is a deposit line that grows without depending on a pay rise.
Separate the deposit from everything else
Australia has no IBAN: a domestic account is identified by a BSB and an account number, and the instant transfer rail lets you use a PayID such as a mobile number or an email address. Set up the transfer on the day the money arrives, to an account you do not carry a card for. A deposit that shares an account with your groceries is not a deposit, and the discipline of separation is worth more over ten years than the choice of savings product.
What does 2026 change about the arithmetic?
Three developments this year move real lines in the sheet, and none of them points in the same direction.
Borrowing costs went up three times
The Reserve Bank of Australia raised its policy rate by 0.25 points on three occasions in 2026 — on 3 February, 17 March and 5 May — in response to inflation returning above its target band. That lands directly on the interest line of the buying column, and it is the line with the most weight in a ten-year total. The current level of the cash rate changes, so read it on rba.gov.au on the day you build your sheet rather than taking it from any article, including this one.
Rents and housing costs also moved
The Bureau of Statistics recorded housing as the largest contributor to inflation, up 6.8 % over the twelve months to June 2026, with rents up 3.6 % and new dwelling purchases up 5.8 %. The Bureau publishes a rent index and not a rent level, so there is no official median rent by capital city to quote — use your own actual rent or a genuine advertised rent for the property type you want, and grow it at a rate you can justify.
Demand is not softening on the population side
Australia counted 27,801,023 residents at 31 December 2025, up 412,500 over twelve months, of which 301,000 came from net overseas migration. The capitals absorbed most of it, gaining 324,700 people in 2024-25. That does not tell you what prices will do, and nobody can. It does tell you that the demand side of a ten-year horizon is not built on a shrinking population, which is a fact worth holding alongside the interest rate one.
| Jurisdiction | Mean dwelling price, March quarter 2026 | Relative to the national mean |
|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | $1,324,800 | Highest in the country |
| Queensland | $1,123,700 | Above the national mean |
| Western Australia | $1,103,500 | Just below the national mean |
| Australian Capital Territory | $1,018,000 | Below the national mean |
| South Australia | $973,100 | Below the national mean |
| Victoria | $947,100 | Well below the national mean |
| Tasmania | $750,300 | Second lowest |
| Northern Territory | $597,300 | Lowest in the country |
Running it this weekend
Set your horizon first and be honest about it, because everything else is calibrated to that number. Get your transfer duty and any first home buyer concession from your own state revenue office, not from a national summary, and check the current cash rate at its source on the day. Build the two columns of unrecoverable costs, add the opportunity cost of the deposit on the renting side, and only then look at the totals. If the difference is small, the decision is not financial and you should make it on the grounds that actually matter to you — stability, flexibility, where you want to be in ten years. If the deposit is what is missing rather than the arithmetic, start the savings line now and let the calculation wait: building it steadily with I am Beezy alongside your salary turns a theoretical comparison into a real choice.
