ABS Statistical Areas: NSW Administrative Boundaries

New South Wales features official geospatial boundaries for Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Statistical Areas Levels 1 through 4 (SA1, SA2, SA3, SA4). These boundaries are the standard geography for collecting and reporting census and statistical data under the Census and Statistics Act 1905. The data is provided as hosted feature layers but is currently in a GDA94 spatial reference system that is scheduled for retirement.

Use Cases

• Aggregating census data to SA1 or SA2 levels for neighborhood-level demographic analysis.
• Creating thematic maps of socioeconomic indicators using SA3 or SA4 boundaries for regional planning.
• Joining administrative or business data to ABS statistical geographies for spatial analysis.
• Transitioning legacy mapping applications from the retiring GDA94 service to the new GDA2020 service.

Strengths

• Data is published under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, facilitating reuse.
• Represents the official, legally-defined statistical geography for the Australian Census in NSW.
• Available as multiple, nested geographic levels (SA1-SA4) for analysis at different scales.

Limitations

• The primary listed services are deprecated and scheduled for retirement, requiring users to migrate to new GDA2020 services.
• The spatial reference is GDA94, which is incompatible with modern GDA2020 environments without transformation.
• Key metadata such as row counts, column names, and specific update frequencies are not provided.

Provenance

Source

Spatial Services (DCS), New South Wales Government, based on Australian Bureau of Statistics standards.

Collection Method

Derived from the ABS Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS).

Freshness

Last updated dates range from 2026-04-08 to 2026-04-15, but these refer to the deprecated GDA94 service listings.

Geography

State of New South Wales, Australia.