How these figures are made

The figures come from the Internet Vacancy Index, published monthly by Jobs and Skills Australia. It counts job advertisements appearing on a defined set of online job boards, by occupation and by region.

An advertisement is the unit. Not a vacancy, not a hire, not a person: an advertisement, appearing on one of the boards the index covers, during the reference month. That distinction runs through everything on this site and is the single most important thing on this page.

The current release covers 50 regions and 56 occupation groups, for July 2026. Australia is divided into the eight capital cities and the regions outside them, which together cover the country exactly once.

Nothing on this site is a count of vacancies in Australia. In particular:

Boundaries are the Australian Statistical Geography Standard, Edition 4, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The index reports the eight capital cities as Greater Capital City Statistical Areas and the rest of the country as Statistical Areas Level 4.

Those two levels sit side by side rather than one inside the other, and their figures must never be added together. A capital city and the SA4s that make it up describe the same ground twice.

A state total on this site is the sum of the regions the publisher reports on within that state. The publisher releases this index by region, not by state, so the state figure is arithmetic done here. Every page showing one says so. Where a region carried no figure for the month, the state total is the sum of those that did, and the page says how many reported.

Boundaries are simplified for drawing. That is a display decision and it affects the shapes on the map, never the figures beside them.

Occupation groups are reported at the level Jobs and Skills Australia publishes them, with the codes and names the publisher uses. Where the publisher names a code inconsistently across regions, no name is shown rather than one of them being chosen.

Occupation groups must not be added together. They nest and overlap, so summing them produces a total nobody published. The all-occupations figure comes from the publisher’s own all-occupations row, never from adding the groups up.

Job advertisements are a separate matter. A listing is mapped to an occupation classification only where the mapping is established; an unmapped listing stays unmapped rather than being guessed into a plausible code.

Every figure belongs to a reference month, and the month is stated wherever the figure appears. The current release is July 2026.

2 reference periods are held: the current month and the one before it, currently June 2026. A change shown on this site is that comparison and nothing more.

Two points are a comparison, not a trend. Nothing here is described as a trend, because a direction cannot be established from two observations. The publisher’s own workbook holds the full history, and trends will appear on this site when enough periods have accumulated to support them honestly.

Where no prior period is held, a page reports that there is no comparison. It does not report a change of zero, which is a different statement.

A figure that does not exist is never shown as zero. Absence has kinds, and they are distinguished:

Alongside the statistics, this site republishes individual job advertisements from the sources it is licensed to carry. These are a different kind of thing from the index figures and are never mixed with them.

They are shown and never counted. The listing corpus mixes sources, and one of them reserves aggregate figures for a written licence, so there is no count of advertisements anywhere on this site. The figures on the map and the location pages come from the Internet Vacancy Index; the listings do not add to them and are not a sample of them.

Three dates travel with a listing and they mean different things:

The original advertisement is authoritative. Every listing links to it, and where this site and the source disagree, the source is right. What is and is not reproduced from an advertisement is recorded field by field.

Each advertisement carries a label describing what it says about visa sponsorship, together with the words that produced it. The label reports wording. It is not advice, and it says nothing about any reader’s visa position or eligibility.

Labels are matched on phrases rather than keywords, because “visa” alone appears in job titles and in descriptions of who may apply, neither of which is an offer to sponsor anyone. For anything about a visa, see the Department of Home Affairs.

The things most likely to mislead a reader who skips the rest of this page:

If a figure here looks wrong, an advertisement is out of date, or a listing carries information it should not, it should be corrected. Every figure is traceable to the release it came from, so a correction can be checked rather than argued about.

A reporting route is not yet published, and this page will name it when it is. In the meantime the original publisher is authoritative for anything they released, and every listing and figure on this site links back to its source.

WorkMap is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Jobs and Skills Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the State of Queensland, or any other organisation whose data it draws on.