Overview
- Households across Australia are receiving instruction letters ahead of the compulsory census night on Tuesday August 11, when the ABS will count everyone present in the country.
- Completing the census is legally required and repeated non‑completion can attract fines up to A$364 per day while knowingly false answers can draw fines up to A$3,640.
- The 2026 form includes about 12 changes, notably two new optional questions for people aged 16 and over on gender and sexual orientation and revised wording for the sex question as “sex recorded at birth.”
- To reach people without stable housing and remote communities the ABS has recruited roughly 30,000 field staff, will run a Homelessness Enumeration Week, and offers paper forms, pop‑up hubs and multilingual support.
- The ABS says names and addresses are separated from responses, online answers are encrypted, paper forms are destroyed after processing, and aggregated data will guide planning for schools, hospitals and infrastructure.