Fact check: are international students making it harder to find a place to rent as Dutton claims?

Peter Dutton claims cutting at least 80,000 new international students from Australian higher education institutions will make it easier for you to find a rental property, saying Labor’s high migration intake has fuelled the housing crisis.

It would mean space for 115,000 at publicly funded universities and up to 125,000 overseas students in VET sector (such as Tafe), private universities (including the Gold Coast’s Bond University and Melbourne Business School) and non-university higher education providers.

Together, the Coalition’s policy would mean 240,000 international students a year could study in Australia. It’s actually not that different from a proposed policy Labor tried to pass through parliament last year to cap overall overseas student enrolments to 270,000 by 2025.

“We’re cutting migration because we want to put Australians first. We want Australians into homes,” Dutton said.

But experts and industry bodies have repeatedly shot down the claim that international students are increasing pressure on the housing market.

In 2024, just 4% of Australian rentals were taken up by international students (and 6% were taken up by domestic students), according to research from the Property Council of Australia.

Moreover it found median weekly rent increased by 30% while student visa arrivals decreased by 13% in the four years between 2019 and 2023.

Research by the University of South Australia, published in January, also found there was actually no direct correlation between the cost of rent in Australia and international student numbers.

The study examined data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and government departments 2017 and 2024.

The research concluded, “data analysis at the national level, before and after Covid, consistently revealed the negative relationship between international student number and weekly rental cost”.

“International students only constitute a tiny piece of the puzzle in the rental crisis and are not the main competitors in the rental market.”

Why? International students are actually less likely to be competitive in the rental market, because they often don’t have local rental history and credit – meaning they usually choose student accommodation.

The Group of Eight (Go8), which represents top Australian public universities including the University of Sydney, Australian National University and the University of Melbourne, argued heavily against Labor’s proposed student caps in 2024, and said students had little impact on housing pressures.

Other than increasing supply, other changes have been blamed for a squeeze on the housing and rental market.

The Reserve Bank of Australia said in 2024 that new housing wasn’t keeping pace with population growth, and increasing construction costs and capacity constraints were slowing development.

It also said the desire for more space that occurred during the pandemic lockdowns, and the number of people living in a household, had continued to drop, leading to more housing pressure.

The RBA assistant governor (economic), Sarah Hunter, said in a speech in May, the average number in a household has dropped from around 2.8 in the mid 1980s to around 2.5 more recently.

“This may sound like a small change. But, if for some reason average household size rose back to 2.8, we would need 1.2 million fewer dwellings to house our current population – no small difference,” she said.

Between late 2020 and August 2022, the RBA estimated that the average household size shrunk from 2.55 individuals to 2.48 individuals nationally, requiring 120,000 additional homes to be built.