Where Are Jobs Growing in Australia? A Region-by-Region Guide

Quick answer

Job growth in Australia is not evenly spread, and it is not decided at the national level. It happens region by region, occupation by occupation. Right now, the standout patterns are: Western Australia's regions have been climbing the labour market rankings for three straight years, running well ahead of the rest of the country; the Southern Murray-Darling Basin (Riverina and Shepparton, NSW/Victoria) went from below-average to above-average conditions in a single year on the back of agriculture, food services and transport hiring; and the corridor from the Gold Coast through to the Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba, Queensland, keeps adding people and jobs as workers relocate from Brisbane and interstate. Health care and social assistance is the fastest-growing industry almost everywhere, in cities and regions alike.

The method behind this: Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) publishes two regional data sets, the Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation (NERO) and the Regional Labour Market Indicator (RLMI). Used together, and read carefully, they can tell you whether your kind of work is growing in your region, not just whether Australia's economy is growing overall.

If you want to see which roles you are already close to, start with the free Career Change Check.

How to read regional jobs data honestly

Most "best places to work" content is written for the whole country, which makes it close to useless if you are a claims officer in Wagga Wagga or an administrator in Ballarat. National headlines about job growth blend together mining booms in the Pilbara, tech hiring in inner Sydney and aged care expansion in regional Tasmania into one number that describes none of those places accurately.

JSA's NERO data exists to fix that. It estimates employment for 355 occupations across 88 Statistical Area 4 (SA4) regions, the geographic units the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses to divide the country into city and regional labour markets. NERO is updated monthly and uses a technique JSA calls nowcasting: a mix of traditional labour force data, real-time indicators and machine learning models to estimate what is happening in between the five-yearly Census counts.

That is genuinely useful, but it comes with a catch you should not skip past. NERO is an experimental data product built on an emerging nowcasting method, and JSA is explicit that its estimates are smoothed to show long-term trends, not short-term spikes or precise headcounts. Its own guidance says the scale and direction of change over time is more informative than the exact numbers, and that NERO should not be treated as a substitute for the ABS Labour Force Survey when you need a precise, current figure. In plain terms: use NERO to see which way a region and occupation are trending over the past year or five years, not to bank on an exact number of jobs.

Caption: JSA's NERO nowcast tracks employment trends across 88 regions and 355 occupations, updated monthly. Alt text: Map of Australian SA4 regions showing relative employment growth from Jobs and Skills Australia NERO data.

Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation, Jobs and Skills Australia, Commonwealth of Australia. Used under Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence.

Alongside NERO, JSA runs the Regional Labour Market Indicator (RLMI), a single measure that folds together employment rate, unemployment rate and other capacity indicators into one rating per SA4 region, from "poor" through to "strong". It is a good sense check: if a region's RLMI rating is climbing at the same time NERO shows growth in your occupation there, that is a stronger signal than either data set alone. The RLMI is meant to be released quarterly, but as at the time of writing, the March 2025 results remain JSA's latest published RLMI release, so check the RLMI page directly for a more recent update before relying on a specific rating.

Growth by region: where the numbers point

The clearest recent story in JSA's regional data is Western Australia. In the March 2025 RLMI results, six of WA's nine regions were rated "above average" or "strong", up from four regions a year earlier and just three five years before that. JSA links this to a strong state economy, faster-than-expected population growth and tight demand for workers. That pattern has continued outside JSA's own data too: CommSec's State of the States report ranked WA as Australia's top-performing state economy for a fifth consecutive quarter in its October 2025 edition, the most recent published at the time of writing, with WA leading on household spending, housing finance, dwelling starts and equipment investment.

Regional Victoria and NSW have their own pocket of strength. The Southern Murray-Darling Basin, which covers the Riverina and Shepparton SA4 regions, moved from "below average" and "average" ratings in December 2023 to "above average" by December 2024. The working-age employment rate in that area rose from 76.4% to 80.1% over the year, against a national average that actually dipped slightly to 76.7% over the same period. JSA attributes the shift to hiring growth in agriculture, food services and transport, Australia's food supply chain running at full stretch.

In Queensland, the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba SA4 regions have kept adding population and jobs as people move out of Brisbane and interstate for lower housing costs and a shorter commute to a capital city. JSA describes this as a self-reinforcing pattern: population growth brings more demand for local services (health, retail, construction, education) which in turn creates more of the local, service-sector jobs that this audience is most likely to be looking for.

None of this means regional Australia is uniformly strong. JSA's own numbers show the gap between the best and worst performing regions is still wide: as at the March 2025 RLMI, 91% of Australia's regions had an employment rate above 70%, up from 62% a decade earlier, and 83% had unemployment below 5%, up from just 15% a decade earlier. That is broad-based improvement, but "broad-based" still leaves plenty of regions lagging, mostly remote areas rather than the regional centres covered above.

Regional vs metro: where wedge-adjacent roles are growing

For readers coming from call centre, claims, admin and customer-service backgrounds, the industry-level pattern matters more than any single postcode. JSA's 2025 Employment Projections, published in December 2025 and covering the ten years to May 2035, show Health Care and Social Assistance as the fastest-growing industry in the country, already the largest employer (around one in six jobs) and projected to keep expanding faster than every other sector. The growth is uneven by state: JSA projects Health Care and Social Assistance employment to grow 27% in WA, 26% in Victoria, 25% in Queensland, 23% nationally, 20% in NSW, 18% in the Northern Territory, 16% in South Australia and 12% in Tasmania over that ten-year window.

Inside that industry, the occupations growing fastest are ones with real overlap to claims, coordination and customer-facing admin experience. JSA projects Nursing Support and Personal Care Workers to grow 24.7% over the decade, Ambulance Officers and Paramedics 22.6%, Dental Assistants 26.8%, and Health and Welfare Services Managers 27.1%. Community and Personal Service Workers as a whole group are projected to grow 13.7% to 2035. If you have spent years managing case files, calming down frustrated customers or coordinating between departments, that skill set transfers more directly into care coordination, patient liaison and health administration roles than most people expect.

The same projections carry a warning for anyone staying in a straight clerical or administrative pathway. JSA's own summary notes that occupations with weak or negative projected growth are concentrated in Clerical and Administrative Workers and Labourers, roles that have traditionally been important entry points into the workforce but are now facing the slowest growth, or outright decline, of any major occupation group. That is consistent with what this site covers elsewhere on at-risk jobs in Australia: the risk is not that admin work disappears overnight, it is that its growth stalls while adjacent, more human-facing roles keep expanding.

That is exactly the shift readers researching a claims career change in Sydney or looking at health admin roles in Melbourne should be paying attention to: the same city, but a different lane inside health, insurance or community services, where JSA's numbers point up rather than sideways.

Should you move, or is the growth already in your region?

Relocating for work is a real option for some readers, particularly if you are early in a career change and not tied down by school-aged kids, a mortgage in a specific suburb or a partner's job. But it is worth checking the local numbers before assuming you need to move at all. NERO's region-by-occupation detail exists precisely so you can look up your own SA4 region, whether that is Western Sydney, Geelong, the Sunshine Coast or the Hunter Valley, and see which occupations are trending up there over the past year and the past five years, before deciding relocation is necessary.

For most people in this audience, the more useful move is not geographic but occupational: staying in the same city or town and shifting from a shrinking role into a growing one nearby. The Southern Murray-Darling Basin and South East Queensland examples above show growth concentrated in regions that already have decent populations and existing service infrastructure, not remote outposts requiring a complete life relocation. If a move away from family, school and existing support networks is on the table, treat it as a last resort worth weighing against the local alternative, not a first move because a chart looked promising.

Whichever direction you are leaning, the starting point is the same: understand how exposed your current role is, and what is realistically growing nearby. Our career change pathways guide walks through how to plan that shift once you know where the growth is.

FAQ

Where are the most jobs being created in Australia right now? Health care and social assistance is the single biggest driver of job growth nationally, and it is growing fastest in Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland (27%, 26% and 25% over the decade to 2035, per JSA's 2025 Employment Projections). Regionally, Western Australia's SA4 regions and the Southern Murray-Darling Basin have shown the strongest recent momentum in JSA's Regional Labour Market Indicator.

What is the fastest-growing region for jobs in Australia? There is no single answer: JSA tracks 88 regions and growth varies by occupation within each one. Western Australia has the most regions rated "above average" or "strong" in the RLMI, while South East Queensland (Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba) shows strong population-driven job growth. Check NERO for your own occupation and region rather than relying on a national ranking.

How do I find job growth data for my own region? Use JSA's NERO dashboard at jobsandskills.gov.au/data/nero. Search your SA4 region and occupation (ANZSCO 4-digit level) to see estimated employment trends over the past year and five years. Remember NERO is smoothed data, so read the direction of change, not the exact figures, and cross-check with the RLMI rating for that region.

Should I relocate for better job prospects? Only if the numbers for your occupation locally are genuinely weak and a target region shows sustained growth, not a single good month. Regional growth in health care, aged care and community services is broad enough that many readers will find a growing lane without moving house. Check local data before assuming relocation is necessary.

Is regional Australia a good place to find work after redundancy? It depends heavily on the region and the occupation. JSA data shows real improvement over the past decade (91% of regions now have employment rates above 70%), but conditions still vary widely, and remote regions generally lag behind regional centres and cities. Check your specific SA4 region's RLMI rating before making decisions based on "regional Australia" as a single category.

Get your own picture

National jobs data cannot tell you whether your role is growing where you live. The free Career Change Check shows roles people from your kind of work moved into; it does not know where you live. Get your free Career Change Check.

Sources

Jobs and Skills Australia, "Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation (NERO)", jobsandskills.gov.au/data/nero, October 2025 data (released 5 November 2025), accessed July 2026
Jobs and Skills Australia, "Regional Labour Market Indicator", jobsandskills.gov.au/data/regional-labour-market-indicator, March 2025 results (latest published at time of writing), accessed July 2026
Jobs and Skills Australia, "Regional employment at strongest levels in a decade", published 16 May 2025, jobsandskills.gov.au/news/regional-employment-strongest-levels-decade
Jobs and Skills Australia, "Regional Australia's job market: A tale of two trends", published 7 February 2025, jobsandskills.gov.au/news/regional-australias-job-market-tale-two-trends
Jobs and Skills Australia, "2025 Employment Projections: Summary Report", published December 2025, jobsandskills.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-12/employment_projection_-_summ Changing Careers provides general information, not licensed career or financial advice.