A structure or a discrete space within a structure intended for people to live in or where a person or group of people live.

Dwellings are the main statistical unit in the housing sector. Information on the number of occupied dwellings and tenantable and untenantable vacancies in a dwelling is collected by housing providers for planning purposes. Dwellings may be owned, managed, and/or made available for use by a specific program, including head-leased stock from private and government sources. Dwellings include boarding house buildings and boarding house units.

A structure that people actually live in is a dwelling regardless of its intended purpose, but a vacant structure is only a dwelling if intended for human residence. A dwelling may include one or more rooms used as an office or workshop provided the dwelling is in residential use.

Boarding house rooms or beds are not identified as separate dwellings unless they are self-contained. Self-contained rooms are therefore defined as units and are counted as a separate dwelling.

For the public rental housing and state owned and managed Indigenous housing data collections, the number of tenancy (rental) units is used as a proxy for counting the number of dwellings.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) 2011. Census Dictionary, 2011. ABS cat. no. 2901.0. Canberra: ABS. Viewed 9 February 2017, http://www.abs.gov.au

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare