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. Here is the Australian data, and how to use it in a location decision.
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 — understating the true opportunity by a factor of 19.
The same misreading happens in reverse in purely residential suburbs. Mount Waverley in Melbourne has a residential population of around 26,000, but its daytime population during working hours is closer to 14,000 — because a large proportion of residents commute out to work. A lunchtime café assuming 26,000 potential customers at midday is significantly overestimating its addressable market.
Australian CBD daytime population data (ABS Working Population Profile)
The ABS Working Population Profile, derived from the census journey-to-work data, provides the best available estimate of daytime worker populations by location. The numbers below combine the worker estimate with resident population to produce a total daytime population estimate. These figures represent a typical weekday during business hours.
Why this data matters for your rent decision
A CBD site at $8,000/month with 350,000 daytime visitors needs to capture just 0.007% of them per day to hit 200 transactions — achievable for a well-positioned café. A suburban strip at $3,000/month with 6,000 daytime residents needs to capture 3.3% to hit the same transaction count — much harder. Higher rent can be justified by higher daytime population density.
Where to get daytime population data in Australia
The ABS Working Population Profile is freely downloadable from the ABS website, organised by Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2), which roughly corresponds to suburb boundaries. The most useful dataset is "POWP — Place of Work" from the 2021 census, updated in 2022. It gives estimated worker population by SA2 for every part of Australia.
For finer-grained pedestrian count data, major council areas publish their own datasets. The City of Melbourne produces an annual pedestrian count report with hourly sensor data across the CBD and inner suburbs. City of Sydney publishes similar data. These are the most granular publicly available foot traffic datasets in Australia and should be consulted for any CBD or near-CBD location decision.
Worked example: comparing two Brisbane café locations
Consider two Brisbane café sites: one in the CBD on Queen Street, one in Indooroopilly on Station Road. On face value, the Indooroopilly site at $2,800/month looks more attractive than the CBD site at $5,500/month. But the daytime population changes the picture.
The rent-to-revenue ratio comes out roughly equal at the midpoint — but the CBD site has a higher upside ceiling (more potential customers available) and the Indooroopilly site has a lower floor (fewer customers to draw on if execution is mediocre). The CBD site is higher risk with higher upside; the suburban site is lower risk with lower ceiling. Neither is obviously better — but the decision requires daytime population data to model properly at all.
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 for demand estimation — particularly for cafes, takeaway and casual dining businesses. The demand score in the report is partly driven by this figure: a location with high daytime population relative to its rent scores well on demand; a location with high rent relative to low daytime population scores poorly, regardless of how attractive the suburb looks on paper.
Night-time businesses: when residential population matters more
Evening restaurants, bars and entertainment venues are the exception to the daytime population rule. For businesses that primarily trade outside working hours, residential population within a walkable or short-drive radius is the relevant metric. This is why the same suburb can be excellent for one type of business and poor for another. Pyrmont in Sydney, for example, has a strong daytime worker population from the Google, Accenture and media offices — making it an excellent lunch location. Its residential population of ~13,000 is also solid for evening dining. But Pyrmont is weak for a Saturday morning brunch café: the workers are absent and the residents are a smaller population than nearby Glebe or Balmain.
See the daytime population estimate for any Australian address — including the demand score it generates for your specific business type.
Analyse your address → →Tools first — then a full report for your address
Free rent, viability, and break-even checks. Upgrade when you are ready for competitors, map, and numbers for a specific site.
No signup required for tools
