India Overtakes England To Become Australia’s Top Foreign-Born Population - For The First Time Ever

Photo: Consul General of India/ Facebook

For most of Australia's recorded history, the answer to "where were our migrants born?" was the same: England. That era is over. 

New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirms that India has overtaken England as the top overseas birthplace in Australia — for the first time since records began.

As at 30 June 2025, 971,020 people born in India are living in Australia, compared to 970,950 born in England.

How a 550,000-person gap became a 70-person gap in ten years

This didn't happen overnight. In 2015, England-born Australians numbered just over a million. India-born residents were at 449,000. That's a gap of more than 550,000 people. Over the following decade, India added 522,000 residents — the largest increase of any country over that period. England lost 36,000. 

The maths is brutal in its clarity. India more than doubled its population in Australia in ten years. England's shrank. Every single year.

The reason is demographics, not policy. The England-born population in Australia has a median age of nearly 60 — a cohort made up largely of post-war and 1960s migrants who have been here for decades. They are aging faster than new arrivals from England are replacing them. 

The India-born population, by contrast, has a median age of 36. They are here for careers, graduate degrees, skilled visas, and in many cases, the long road to permanent residency and citizenship. 

One in three Australians now born overseas

Zoom out and the India-England story sits inside a bigger demographic shift. Australia's total population reached 27.6 million as of June 30, 2025, of whom 8.8 million — 32 per cent — were born overseas.

That proportion is now within touching distance of the highest ever recorded. The record is 32.4 per cent, set in 1891, when most of those overseas arrivals were from Britain and Ireland.

Today's overseas-born population looks nothing like that. The top five countries of birth are India, England, China, New Zealand and the Philippines. China sits third with 732,000 residents — up 32,000 from 2024 and surpassing its own previous peak.

New Zealand is fourth at 638,000. The Philippines is fifth 412,000 — a community that barely registered in national data twenty years ago. 

Nepal: the number that isn't getting enough attention

Buried in the data is a figure that deserves a headline of its own. In 2015, approximately 50,000 Nepal-born people lived in Australia. By mid-2025, that number was 213,000. A four-fold increase in a decade.

Nepal now ranks eighth nationally, ahead of Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and its community is the youngest of any major migrant group — with a median age of just 30.

These are overwhelmingly students and young skilled workers who arrived through education and post-study visa pathways. They are, in many respects, the next wave of what Indian migration looked like in 2005.

Europe's post-war cohort is ageing out — permanently

The flipside of this growth story is decline. The great European migration cohorts of the 1950s and 60s are disappearing from the data.

Italy recorded the largest decrease of any country between 2015 and 2025, losing 46,000 residents, followed by England at 36,000, Greece at 29,000 and Germany at 18,000. In 2024, Italy dropped out of Australia's top 10 countries of birth for the first time since 1901. 

The median ages tell the whole story. People born in Italy living in Australia have a median age of 74. Greeks, 77.

Latvians — the oldest migrant group in the country — 80. These were the men and women of the Assisted Passage scheme, who crossed the world on cargo ships to build a new country. They built it. Their communities are not being replenished.

Where in Australia are migrants settling?

The concentration of specific communities varies sharply by state. Victoria and the ACT have India as their single largest overseas-born population.

New South Wales is topped by China. Queensland and Western Australia are still led by England — but given current trajectories, not for much longer.

Western Australia has the highest proportion of overseas-born residents of any state, at 34.1 per cent, while Tasmania has the lowest at 16.3 per cent.

The coastal cities — Sydney, Melbourne, Perth — are where the numbers concentrate. Regional and island Australia remains overwhelmingly Australian-born, and largely Anglo-European in its migrant history. 

Australia Vs World: The Migrant Story

Australia's 32 per cent overseas-born rate is extraordinary by international standards.

The United States, the country most associated with immigration in the popular imagination, has a foreign-born population of just 15 per cent.

Germany sits at 19.8 per cent. The UK, 17 per cent. Canada, 22 per cent. Australia ranks eighth in the world by absolute numbers of migrants, with 8.6 million. 

It's worth being clear about what the ABS is actually measuring here. These figures count everyone living in Australia who was born overseas — citizens, permanent residents, and temporary visa holders alike.

A person born in Mumbai who has been an Australian citizen for decades is counted. So is an international student in their first semester at Monash. The data says nothing about identity, language, or how long someone intends to stay.

The ABS will update these figures again in twelve months. Barring something dramatic — a change in visa policy, a global economic shock, a pandemic — the gap between India and England will be considerably wider by then.

Over the decades, Australia has sheltered migrant families -  the Irish who fled famine, the Italians and Greeks who came on assisted passages and built the suburbs, the Vietnamese who arrived with nothing after 1975 and built communities that now anchor entire city precincts.

Every generation of migration rewrites the country a little. This one — South Asian, young, educated, urban — is rewriting it a lot.