Step up
First job switches usually give the largest pay jumps of a career.
Bronze row · ages 22 to 31
First job switches usually give the largest pay jumps of a career.
Three months of expenses is a common target, held somewhere easy to access.
Health cover, income protection and car cover. Medicare levy surcharge and loading rules start to matter.
Credit cards and buy now pay later can erode savings if not cleared each month.
Partners often begin to share rent and costs.
Search these names on the department sites below. Links go to each department's home page.
Figures from published research for the age groups that cover 24–25. Sources often publish wider age groups, so the group shown is the one that includes these ages. They describe groups of people, not any one person. Checked 23 October 2026.
May 2025. Persons. Enrolled in study includes school.
August 2025. Employees only.
Calendar year 2025. Top two scam types by total loss among reports that included a loss. Unreported scams are not counted.
Australian Youth Barometer 2025. A survey of 527 people aged 18 to 24, not an official statistic.
2025 Consumer Payments Survey. Share of payments made using cards.
30 June 2024. Per account, not per person, because many people hold more than one account. Median is the middle account; average is pulled up by large balances.
2019–20 financial year. By age of the household's reference person, as shown in the ABS graph. The ABS page does not say whether the values are averages or medians, so treat them as indicative.
2019–20. Share of all recent first home buyers in this age group (age of the household reference person). It is not the share of the age group who buy.
Census 2021. Owners with and without a mortgage combined.
Census 2021. Share of young adults living in their parents' home.
Census 2021. Share of people in the age group who lived alone.
2024. Births per 1,000 women in the age group.
2022. Share of people in the age group who provide informal care. About 11.9% of all Australians living in households (3.0 million) were carers.
2022. Share of people in the age group with disability. Overall 21.4% of Australians (5.5 million) had disability in 2022.
Dollar figures are in the dollars of the year shown. Average and median are not the same: the median is the middle value. Not financial advice.
Illustrative gross incomes: lower about $50,000, middle about $100,000, higher about $200,000 a year. For ages under 18, read these as household incomes. For retirement ages, read them as lower, middle and higher income and savings. They are examples, not official brackets.
An emergency fund of even one month is hard to build. Clearing high-interest debt first usually pays best.
Three months in savings, a share of rent covered by a partner, and extra super contributions are within reach.
Most pay goes toward saving or investing. Private health cover is chosen deliberately to avoid surcharge and loading.