Alcohol available for consumption in Australia

What is ‘alcohol available for consumption’?

This publication quantifies the amount of alcohol being made available to people living in Australia every year. Rather than measuring the drinking habits of individuals, this collection examines the availability of alcohol across Australia. While this does not allow for examination of results below the national level, or for disaggregations by priority population groups, it does allow for long-term trends in the total amount of beer, wine, cider and spirits entering the Australian community to be examined.

‘Alcohol available for consumption’ was previously referred to as ‘Apparent consumption of alcohol’. All estimates are generated as part of the Apparent Consumption of Alcohol collection.

While the total amount of alcohol being made available in a given year does not directly translate to individual consumption patterns, changes in availability are likely to reflect broad changes in consumption patterns. Trends in availability are therefore useful for indicating whether the Australian community is drinking more or less alcohol on average than previously, and how different beverage types have contributed to the total amount of alcohol being consumed.

Results within this publication should be interpreted in relation to the time-series rather than used for absolute values of the amount of alcohol that was consumed each year, due to limitations in the data sources and assumptions made:

• The collection assumes that all alcohol that was produced or imported in a given financial year was consumed in the same financial year.
• No data is available to account for beverages that may have been wasted, used in cooking, cellared, or otherwise not consumed.
• The collection does not account for beverages that were purchased overseas and brought into the country duty-free.

Previous publications

This report presents the most up-to-date estimates as generated by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). This release replaces the previous estimates which ran from 1944–45 to 2022–23 and released on 08 November 2024.

This publication is a continuation of the long-running Apparent Consumption of Alcohol, Australia series previously run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). For an explanation of the previous calculation methods, see the ABS website (2019).

Revisions to results published in the previous release

Results in this publication are subject to change as data sources are updated and revised over time.

Changes in Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) data reported by the ATO from 2019–20 to 2022–23 (ATO 2025) have been incorporated into this release. Additionally, the average alcohol content of red and white table wines was updated for 2017–18 to better reflect the method used in adjacent financial years. These changes have caused minor changes in the amount of wine made available for consumption in Australia in 2017–18 and from 2019–20 to 2022–23. Most notably, a previously observed reduction in the amount of wine made available for consumption in Australia in the 2019–20 has been smoothed out (Figure 6), as the estimated amount of tax from the sale of wine in this period increased by 5.1% from previous estimates (ATO 2025).

In addition, estimates of the average alcohol content of beer brewed in Australia were provided by alcohol industry producers from 2018–19 to 2022–23, and have replaced AIHW projections of alcohol strength used in the previous release. Estimates of the volume of beer and the volume of alcohol from beer have been revised in the same financial years.

Small changes to population estimates have resulted in minor changes in per capita results for some years (ABS 2025).

All estimates that have changed since the previous publication of this report are indicated with a ‘†’ in the data tables.