Publish the wait of people still waiting, not just of people who got housed
The headline social housing wait is a median computed over households that were housed. The 55,222 general applicants still on the NSW register — including everyone who has waited longest — are not in it. A statistic computed only over people who left a queue cannot describe the queue.
Steps this would change
Rationale
As at 31 March 2026 the published median waiting time for general applicants housed from the NSW Housing Register was 15.1 months, and 4.5 months for priority applicants.
As at 31 December 2025 there were 67,316 households on the register — 12,094 priority approved and 55,222 general approved.
Those two facts are usually reported together and they do not describe the same population. The median is computed over households that reached the front. It excludes, by construction, every household still waiting — and the longer someone has been waiting, the more certain it is that they are excluded from the number used to describe their wait.
This is survivorship bias, and it runs in a predictable direction: the published figure is a floor, and the gap between it and reality grows with the size of the backlog.
Nobody is being dishonest here. Homes NSW publishes expected waiting times by area separately, does not claim the median means anything else, and publishes the register counts that let a careful reader notice the problem. The issue is which number travels. "Fifteen months" is what gets quoted; the household in an area with a multi-year expected wait is reading a statistic about somebody else.
What to publish instead, from data already held:
- Time-on-register for the current register, not just for those housed — median and distribution, by category and area. This is the number a household wants and the only one that describes the queue.
- Exits by reason. Housed, withdrawn, no longer eligible, lost contact, died. A register that shrinks because people give up is not the same as one that shrinks because people are housed, and the two are currently indistinguishable from outside.
- Change rates on priority refusals. Priority status is worth roughly ten months on the published medians, which makes it one of the higher-value administrative decisions in this database — and nobody publishes how often a refusal is overturned on review.
Days saved: zero. This houses nobody. The wait is rationing — there are not enough dwellings, and no reporting reform builds one. What it changes is whether the scale of the rationing is visible, which on this site's standing argument is the precondition for anyone being accountable for it.
Who acts: New South Wales, and every other state publishing the same shape of statistic.
What is being traded away
The honest number will be much worse and will be used badly. Publishing time-on-register for people still waiting will produce figures in years, and they will be deployed by people who want to argue that social housing does not work rather than that there is not enough of it. A government that publishes a number which is then used against it learns not to publish numbers, and this site's entire method depends on governments publishing numbers.
Exit-by-reason data is sensitive and partly unknowable. "Lost contact" covers a household that found private housing and a household that became homeless and uncontactable. Publishing it without that ambiguity flagged would create a statistic as misleading as the one being replaced.
It could distort allocation. A published time-on-register metric creates pressure to house the longest-waiting household rather than the household in greatest need, and the current order — emergency accommodation, then priority, then elderly, then wait-turn — is deliberately not first-come. If the measure became a target, the people it would displace are the ones in urgent need. Any version of this must publish time-on-register alongside need category, never as a single headline.
And this database should note its own limit. Almost every duration in the social housing process except the 459-day wait is our estimate, and the 459 itself is the flawed published median being criticised here. This project is using the number it says should not be used, because it is the only one there is. That is the finding, and it is uncomfortable in the right way.
Precedent
NSW already publishes expected waiting times by area as a separate dataset, and already publishes register counts by category. The components exist; what is missing is the measure everybody actually quotes being the right one.
Sources
- NSW Department of Communities and Justice, published social housing waiting list data: 67,316 households at 31 December 2025 (12,094 priority, 55,222 general)
- Median waiting time for applicants housed at 31 March 2026: 15.1 months general, 4.5 months priority
- NSW expected waiting times for social housing, published dataset