Summary

At 30 June 2020, approximately 4.2 million people (16% of Australia’s total population) were aged 65 and over.

This report focuses on older Australians – generally those aged 65 and over, unless otherwise specified. For older Indigenous Australians, the age range 50 and over is used, reflecting the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and the lower proportion of Indigenous people aged 65 and over.

Older Australians are a diverse group, with different ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, life experiences and lifestyles. These factors all influence the ageing process and affect Australians’ health and wellbeing.

This new release provides insights into this group of older Australians, adopting a person-centred model to explore who they are, how they are changing, how healthy they are and the services they are using. It comprises a rolling series of pages that provide key statistics on the domains that made up the model, including health, income, social support and others. These pages are complemented by feature articles, which explore issues relevant to particular populations of older Australians. Both pages and feature articles will be updated over time, as more information becomes available. Given the diversity of content, we have used a mix of data sources. Hence, the date range available for reporting varies for the information presented for each topic.