What is the biggest city in Australia?

Australia’s largest city is technically Brisbane, but realistically Sydney is the biggest city in Australia. It depends on whether you measure by council area or overall urban area.

The size of a city depends on how you’re measuring it. If going by population of a single council area, then Brisbane is Australia’s biggest city. Brisbane City Council covers a population of about 1.25 million. But tag on outlying suburbs in Brisbane’s metropolitan area, and the total population is around the 2.5 million mark. Brisbane’s history might not compete with Sydney’s, but on this measurement, the Queensland capital wins.

Sydney and Melbourne are considerably bigger than Brisbane, but are broken up into several different council areas. The Sydney City Council, for example, covers a fairly tiny central area.

A boat on the harbour in Sydney, Australia's biggest city. — Sydney: It’s big. Photo by David Whitley/ Australia Travel Questions

Taking the wider metropolitan area, suburbia in both Sydney and Melbourne sprawls for a long old way. This makes the populations of Australia’s two biggest cities around 5.3 million and 4.9 million respectively. This means Sydney is the biggest city in Australia. But if you separate Sydney from the Central Coast, Melbourne tops the list of Australia’s largest cities.

Beyond Australia’s big cities

Most of Australia’s population lives in one of five coastal cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. There are some large urban areas in Queensland that also masquerade as cities, too. But the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast are effectively coastal strips made up of several adjoining Queensland towns.

Beyond that, there are very few cities in Australia with a population of more than 100,000. In New South Wales, there’s just Newcastle, the Central Coast and Wollongong. In Victoria, Ballarat (home of Sovereign Hill), Bendigo and Geelong have a population over 100,000. Queensland offers up Toowoomba, Townsville (including Magnetic Island) and Cairns.

The only other cities in Australia with a population of more than 100,000 are Canberra – the capital of Australia – plus Northern Territory capital Darwin and Hobart in Tasmania.

Mount Gambier, the second largest city in South Australia, can’t even muster 30,000 people. Western Australians are heavily concentrated in Perth. Bunbury, home of the Koombana Bay Dolphin Discovery Centre, is the second largest city, with a population of around 75,000.