Where our numbers come from.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the Occupation Standard Classification of Australia (OSCA) in 2024. It replaced the older ANZSCO system. OSCA lists every recognised occupation in Australia, along with the tasks each one involves.

We use OSCA codes and task statements as the backbone of every role page. When you see a six-digit code next to a role title, that is its OSCA code.

Refresh: updated by the ABS when the classification changes (typically every few years).

The pay figure on a role page is the median weekly earnings from the ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025. It is the median for full-time employees who are not managers and who are paid at the adult rate, before tax and before salary sacrifice.

The ABS does not publish a pay figure for a single six-digit occupation. It publishes one for a family of related occupations, so every pay figure on this site belongs to a family and the page names which one. We never turn it into a yearly salary and we never present it as an hourly rate, because it is neither.

The ABS withholds the figure for a family when its own sample is too small to be reliable. Where that happens the role page says no median is published rather than showing a number from somewhere else.

Release loaded: May 2025, customised report. Jobs and Skills Australia has said the occupation data on the older ANZSCO basis will not be updated again, so this release is the last one on that basis rather than one we are waiting to replace.

The most recent Census was in 2021. JSA uses Census data to report how many Australians work in each occupation. We display these counts so you can see how large or small a role is nationwide.

Census counts are a snapshot in time. Between Censuses the numbers stay the same. Two things are worth knowing about this one. It was taken during COVID-19 restrictions, which affected some occupations more than others, and the occupation coding in this release is experimental, so it can differ from the ABS’s standard Census occupation tables.

Release loaded: 2021 Census, custom report, OSCA experimental estimates. 859 of 919 roles carry a count. The rest are blank because the ABS suppressed them or publishes none, and a blank stays blank.

JSA publishes a monthly Internet Vacancy Index (IVI) that counts online job advertisements across Australia. The IVI is reported at the unit group level, which means it covers a family of related occupations rather than one specific role.

When we show demand trends on a role page, those numbers come from the IVI. Because the count covers the whole unit group, it may include roles that are closely related but not identical to the one you are looking at.

Release loaded: the July 2026 workbook, covering periods up to June 2026. JSA publishes the index monthly. We do not load it monthly, and the section below says what we do instead.

Jobs and Skills Australia published a study of how Australians move between occupations, built from tax records. We use it to show which jobs people were doing before they took a role.

The counts are rounded to the nearest five, and the most recent year in the release is 2020-21. That is not current-year data and the mover pages say so at the top rather than in a footnote.

Release loaded: Data on Occupation Mobility: Unpacking Workers Movements, published 30 January 2024, covering 2011-12 to 2020-21.

Each year Jobs and Skills Australia assesses whether employers can find the workers they need in an occupation. Where a role carries a rating, we show it in JSA’s own words.

Release loaded: 2025 Occupation Shortage List, six digit. An annual release, so it stands until the 2026 list.

In March 2026 Jobs and Skills Australia published a dataset linking nationally recognised qualifications to the occupations they prepare someone for. Where it lists a qualification as “Occupation ready” for a role, we show that qualification and say JSA said it.

It does not cover every role. 476 of our 919 roles carry at least one Occupation ready qualification. A role with none shows none, rather than a sentence saying nothing is required.

Release loaded: Training Occupation Pathways Dataset, March 2026, version 1.0.

The skills listed against a role, and the way we work out how close two jobs are to each other, come from ESCO, the European Commission’s classification of skills and occupations. It is the only source on this page that is not Australian, and it is used for the skill vocabulary rather than for any Australian figure.

Release loaded: ESCO v1.2. Mapped to our occupations on 14 August 2026.

Not every occupation has a pay figure, a headcount or a vacancy count. Some roles are too small for the ABS to publish without identifying people, some are too new for the 2021 Census, and some are grouped differently in OSCA than in the older ANZSCO system the pay and vacancy releases still use.

When a figure is missing, we leave the section blank rather than guess. You will never see a made-up number on this site. If a role page does not show a pay range or a demand chart, it means no official source publishes that data for this occupation yet.

Nothing on this site reloads itself. Each dataset is loaded by hand, as a decision, and it then stays put until someone loads the next release. There is no automatic import running in the background.

So the honest answer is the release date, not a schedule. Every section above names the release we actually have loaded, and every figure on a role page carries its own date beside it. The dates differ from one another on purpose: the headcount is 2021, the pay figure is May 2025, growth is February 2026, job ad counts run to June 2026, the shortage rating is the 2025 list, and mover flows end at 2020-21. Borrowing one date for all of them would misstate five.

The one that ages fastest is the Internet Vacancy Index, because JSA publishes it every month. When you read a demand chart, check the release date above against today.

If you want to know who chooses and loads these datasets, read who we are.