Skip to contents

Individual tax data by postcode

Source: R/individuals.R
ato_individuals_postcode.Rd

Returns the Individuals Table 6 (or standalone postcode dataset): taxable income, tax payable, and return counts by 4-digit postcode. Headline dataset for income-distribution journalism.

Usage

ato_individuals_postcode(year = "latest", state = NULL, postcode = NULL)

Source

Australian Taxation Office Taxation Statistics postcode release. Licensed CC BY 2.5 AU.

Arguments

year

"YYYY-YY" or "latest". Pass a vector of years (e.g. c("2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23") or 2018:2022) to stack multiple years with a year column added to the output. Useful for time-series analysis.

state

Optional character vector of state codes (e.g. "NSW", c("VIC", "QLD")).

postcode

Optional character vector of 4-digit postcodes.

Value

An ato_tbl with one row per postcode (or per postcode per year for multi-year queries), including state, return count, total income, taxable income, and tax payable. Schema drifts year to year (SA3/SA4 columns present from 2017 onwards).

Details

Privacy suppression. The ATO suppresses postcodes with fewer than 50 returns; those cells are returned as NA after parsing (the package maps "np", "*", and similar tokens to NA so numeric columns stay numeric). Small or remote postcodes will be silently missing from the output.

Monetary values are nominal AUD of the reporting year. Use inflateR::inflate() for real-term series.

References

Atkinson, A.B. and Leigh, A. (2007). "The Distribution of Top Incomes in Australia." Economic Record, 83(262), 247-261. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4932.2007.00412.x

Burkhauser, R.V., Hahn, M.H. and Wilkins, R. (2015). "Measuring top incomes using tax record data: a cautionary tale from Australia." Journal of Economic Inequality, 13(2), 181-205. doi:10.1007/s10888-014-9281-z

See also

Other individuals: ato_individuals(), ato_individuals_age(), ato_individuals_occupation(), ato_individuals_sex(), ato_individuals_state()

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(ato.cache_dir = tempdir())
try({
  # Single year
  p <- ato_individuals_postcode(year = "2022-23", state = "NSW")
  head(p)
  # Multi-year stack with year column
  panel <- ato_individuals_postcode(year = c("2020-21", "2021-22"),
                                    state = "NSW")
})
#> Warning: Could not find "state" column. Tried: "state" and "state_territory".
#> ℹ Downloading <https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/07b51b39-254a-4177-8b4c-497f17e…
#> ✔ Downloading <https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/07b51b39-254a-4177-8b4c-497f17e…
#> 
#> Warning: Could not find "state" column. Tried: "state" and "state_territory".
#> Warning: Could not find "state" column. Tried: "state" and "state_territory".
options(op)
# }