The Victorian Exodus: Who Is Leaving, Where They're Going, and What It Means for North Queensland Property

Between July 2024 and June 2025, Queensland recorded a net interstate migration gain of 21,595 people — the highest of any Australian state, continuing a trend that has been building since 2020. The people leaving Victoria for Queensland are not a monolith: they include young families priced out of Melbourne's inner suburbs, retirees drawn by climate and cost, and property investors whose calculations changed the moment the Victorian government rewrote its land tax framework.

Understanding who is leaving, and why, matters for Queensland property buyers and sellers — because each wave of interstate arrivals carries different housing needs, different price points, and different ideas about where they want to land.

What Changed in Victoria

The Victorian government's land tax reforms, which came into force on 1 January 2024, represent one of the most significant shifts in property investor economics in an Australian state in recent memory. The tax-free threshold for land tax — the value below which no land tax is payable — was slashed from $300,000 to $50,000. For trusts, it was cut to $25,000. Simultaneously, a COVID debt surcharge was added on top of existing rates, and the absentee owner surcharge was doubled from two percent to four percent.

The practical effect, as reported by SBS News and confirmed by property advisory firms, was that approximately 360,000 additional Victorian landowners found themselves paying land tax for the first time. Investors who had structured portfolios below the old threshold — a common small-investor approach — were suddenly facing annual obligations they had not budgeted for. The Absentee Owner Surcharge doubling was particularly punishing for interstate and overseas investors holding Victorian property.

From 1 January 2025, the Vacant Residential Land Tax — previously limited to inner and middle Melbourne suburbs — expanded state-wide. Properties that remain vacant for six or more months in a calendar year now attract an annual tax beginning at one percent of capital improved value in year one, escalating to three percent per annum for properties vacant for three or more consecutive years. A Melbourne property valued at one million dollars vacant for three years accumulates a cumulative tax burden of $60,000 under this structure, in addition to any land tax liability.

ABC property correspondent Michael Janda noted in 2024 that Victorian property investors were describing Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia as the primary destinations under active consideration for portfolio reallocation. Queensland's combination of no land tax on a primary residence, no stamp duty for first home buyers up to the relevant thresholds, and a lower overall rate of investment property taxation compared to Victoria has made it a structural beneficiary of the southern state's revenue policy decisions.

Where the Numbers Actually Flow

The ABS data on net interstate migration is granular enough to be instructive. Queensland's gain of 21,595 net interstate arrivals in the year to June 2025 is the headline. Below that figure, the distribution is significantly uneven.

South-east Queensland — the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, and Brisbane growth corridors — continues to absorb the majority of interstate arrivals, accounting for more than half of regional Queensland's population growth in 2023-24. The Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast each recorded annual growth above 2.5 percent, sustained by ongoing arrivals from Sydney and Melbourne at price points that still represent material savings relative to capital city alternatives.

Tropical North Queensland occupies a different position in the internal migration picture. It is not capturing the same volume as SEQ. But the cohort that does choose Cairns and Far North Queensland tends to have made a deliberate decision — not a default to the nearest affordable alternative to Sydney, but a considered lifestyle repositioning. The data on this cohort is less granular in ABS releases, but it is visible in local rental vacancy and property price growth: Cairns vacancy sitting below one percent, house prices up approximately 14 percent year-on-year in early 2025, represent a market where demand is outpacing supply despite the region receiving a fraction of SEQ's migration volume.

Who Is Actually Choosing Far North Queensland

Three broad cohorts dominate the inquiry patterns observed in the Cairns property market, and they map loosely onto what the data shows nationally.

The first is the retiree and pre-retirement cohort — typically 55 to 70, with significant equity in a Melbourne or Sydney property, and a desire to trade down in financial terms while trading up in lifestyle terms. The Melbourne median house price of approximately $1.1 million, relative to Cairns at significantly lower levels, creates equity release that funds both a new property and a change in cost-of-living baseline. This cohort is climate-motivated: they are not arriving despite the wet season, but because the trade-off between a genuine tropical environment and the cold and grey of a Victorian winter has shifted in their personal calculus.

The second is the remote-work cohort, predominantly 30 to 45, who retained Sydney or Melbourne-calibre incomes through the working-from-home normalisation of 2020-22 and have been slowly discovering that proximity to an office they never enter is not a sufficient reason to pay Sydney rents. As SBS has reported, this demographic has been the primary driver of sea-change and tree-change movement nationally, and Far North Queensland — with its infrastructure adequate for professional remote work and lifestyle attributes unavailable in most Australian capital cities — has absorbed a meaningful share of that cohort.

The third cohort is the investor, typically exiting Victorian holdings or diversifying out of a concentrated Sydney portfolio, seeking yield and growth at a price point that delivers both. Cairns gross rental yields above four to five percent on residential property, at purchase prices significantly below Sydney or Melbourne, represent a proposition that has become more compelling as Victoria's holding costs have risen.

The State-by-State Policy Picture

The migration data does not move independently of government policy, and the state-level policy environment for property varies significantly. Victoria's land tax reforms are the most discussed, but not the only relevant factor.

New South Wales has maintained relatively high stamp duty rates and has not delivered the scale of stamp duty reform that was periodically discussed before the 2023 state election. The first home buyer choice scheme that was briefly operative under the previous government was subsequently wound back, leaving NSW buyers with one of the higher transaction cost environments in the country. Property investors in NSW also face a relatively high land tax rate for investment holdings.

Queensland, by contrast, has maintained a more investor-friendly structure and has not replicated Victoria's 2024 reforms. The state's decision to double its skilled migrant nomination places to 2,600 for 2025-26, and its focus on healthcare and construction workers as priority categories, also creates a structural demand driver that does not apply equally in states with lower regional migration intake targets.

The migration flows that are currently reshaping Queensland's property landscape are not temporary. They are the product of structural policy divergence between states, reinforced by climate preference and cost-of-living realities that have not fundamentally changed. For Far North Queensland, the more interesting question is not whether more people will arrive — they will — but which segments of the arriving cohort will look north of Brisbane, and what they will need when they get here.

---

Sources: ABS — National, State and Territory Population, June 2025; SBS News — Interstate Migration and Victorian Land Tax Coverage 2024; ABC Economics — Property Investor Reallocation Analysis 2024; Victorian State Revenue Office — Land Tax Rate Schedule 2024-25; Queensland Treasury — Migration Programme 2025-26; REIQ — Cairns Market Monitor 2025-26; PropTrack Regional Market Data.