A suburb can have 3,000 residents but 25,000 people in it during business hours. For most retail and food businesses, that daytime population is your real customer pool — not the people who sleep there.
Resident population vs daytime population: why the difference matters
Sydney CBD has a residential population of roughly 18,000 people. On a weekday, over 350,000 people are in the CBD for work, shopping or appointments. For a café, restaurant or retail business, those 350,000 workers and visitors are your customer pool — not the 18,000 residents. Using residential population to estimate demand for a CBD location would give you a completely wrong picture.
Why daytime population matters
CBD locations: daytime population can be 10–20x residential population. Office precincts: workers are the primary customer for lunch trade. Transit hubs: commuter population drives peak morning and evening trade. Shopping centres: visitor population from beyond residential catchment.
Where to get daytime population data in Australia
The ABS produces a dataset called the "Working Population Profile" which gives estimates of daytime worker population by Statistical Area Level 2. This can be combined with journey-to-work data to understand where workers travel from and to. Council economic development departments in major cities also produce daytime population estimates for their areas.
Office precincts generate daytime worker populations that often dwarf their residential numbers — and this is who fills lunchtime food businesses.
How Locatalyze uses daytime population data
When you enter an address into Locatalyze, the system combines residential population within a catchment radius with ABS worker population estimates for that suburb to produce a total "addressable daytime population" figure. This is the denominator we use for demand estimation — particularly for cafes, takeaway and casual dining businesses.
Practical application: CBD vs suburban comparison
A café in Sydney CBD with a $5,000/month rent and a daytime population of 80,000 within 500m has a very different economics picture to a café in a suburban strip with $3,000/month rent and 3,000 people within 500m. The daytime population differential changes the required capture rate dramatically.
Night-time only businesses: when residential matters more
Evening restaurants, bars and entertainment venues are the exception. For businesses that primarily trade outside working hours, residential population is the relevant metric. This is why the same suburb can be excellent for one type of business and poor for another — the population that matters changes depending on your trading hours.
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