This body publishes a statistic that this database has to handle carefully, because it is accurate and widely misread.

As at 31 March 2026, the median waiting time for general applicants housed from the NSW Housing Register was 15.1 months, and for priority applicants 4.5 months.

Read the word "housed". That median describes the people who reached the front of the queue. It does not describe the queue. As at 31 December 2025 there were 67,316 households on the register — 12,094 approved as priority and 55,222 as general — and the ones who have been waiting longest are, by construction, absent from a statistic computed only over those who got out.

This is survivorship in its purest form, and it is not a criticism of Homes NSW, which publishes expected waiting times by area separately and does not claim the median means anything else. It is a criticism of how the number travels. A household reading "15 months" and a household on a register where their area's expected wait runs to years are reading the same figure about different things.

The order of allocation is published and is not first-come: emergency temporary accommodation, then priority approvals and under-occupancy transfers, then elderly clients, then management transfers, then wait-turn. A general applicant's position therefore depends on how many higher-order households arrive after them, which is unknowable in advance and unbounded.

See Publish the wait of people still waiting, not just of people who got housed.