Trends in driver’s licence ownership

Updated January 2025 with data to June 2024.

Data sources:

Note: data quality appears to be a significant issue in this field. I’ve noted several instances of suspect data, and I’ve made some adjustments where there are obvious corrections, and filtered out data where it is almost certainly wrong (including the ACT from most charts – see notes at the end). But there are likely to be some instances of suspect data unfiltered in the charts below.

Total licence ownership

The first chart shows motor vehicle licence ownership for people aged 15+ back to 1971. Note these counts includes learner permits.

Technical notes: the ownership rate is calculated as the sum of car, motorbike and truck licences – including learner and probationary licences, divided by population. Some people have more than one driver’s licence so it’s likely to be an over-estimate of the proportion of the population with any licence. I have filtered out some Western Australian data as it excluded learner’s permits prior to 2013.

Licence ownership rates have fluctuated in many states since the COVID19 pandemic hit, most notably in Victoria and NSW which saw a big uptick in 2021. In most states licence ownership rates dropped in 2023 and were relatively steady in 2024.

Full car licence ownership

The next chart compares “full” licence ownership to people of an age eligible for a full licence (this relies on people getting their licence as early as possible and does not trim for very old people). I have not accounted for any changes in eligibility over time (although graduated licencing started in many states between 2000 and 2007 – before the data set commences).

These rates are lower than in the first chart, as the first chart likely includes people with motor cycle (and possibly truck) licences. They are probably a more accurate representation of driver’s licence ownership rates (if you ignore motorcycles) and they hopefully do not double-count people with heavy vehicle licences (I made some corrections where double counting was obvious in the data).

Similarly here’s a chart showing the ownership rate of a full or provisional licence for people of an age eligible for full or provisional licence:

Note: I have removed data for Northern Territory prior to 2014 as totals across licence types did not reconcile with totals reported across age bands, and otherwise reported unexpected step changes between 2013 and 2014. A similar issue applied for South Australia prior to 2015.

Licence ownership by gender

Technical notes:
Unfortunately data is not available for the Australian Capital Territory because of double-counting.
I’ve inflated the Victorian data as reporting of total licence holders by gender was 7% lower than total licences.
I’ve excluded NSW 2022 because it did not reconcile with other totals.

Licence ownership is higher for males in all states and territories. The data suggests Tasmania has the smallest gap (less than 3%) while Western Australia appears to have the largest gap (11%). The gap between genders does not appear to be closing over time.

The data should only be counting licence holders once regardless of the highest level of heavy vehicle licence held (if above car), so I’m not sure how Western Australian males can have more male licences than men. Perhaps some fly-in-fly-out mining workers have a Western Australian heavy vehicle licence but don’t live in WA? (I’m just guessing)

Licence ownership by age

BITRE publish data for all states and territories since 2010, but Western Australian have not supplied learner permit counts for prior to 2013 so I’ve filtered out figures for those earlier years. I’ve also been able include data for Queensland and New South Wales for earlier years.

Here’s calculated licence ownership by age band for Australia (it includes suspect data from the ACT):

Let’s look at the each age band across the states and territories:

Victoria saw a sharp decline in Victoria to June 2020, followed by a bounce back to a higher rate in 2021, probably because licence testing was suspended during the pandemic. The pandemic has also been associated with increased rates in South Australia, Tasmania, and New South Wales (although it dropped again in 2022). The Northern Territory has a much lower licence rate, possibly due to different eligibility ages for learner’s permits.

For 20-24 year olds the pandemic caused big increases in the rate of licence ownership in most states, however Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australian appear to have peaked. Several states saw a decline between 2023 and 2024.

Similar patterns are evident for 25-29 year olds:

One trend I identified a couple of years ago was that the increasing rate of licence ownership during the pandemic seemed to largely reflect a decline in the population in these age bands during the pandemic period when temporary migrants were told to go home, and immigration almost ground to a halt. Most of the population decline was those without a licence, while the number of licence holders remained fairly steady.

For Victorians in their 20s, the increase in the licence ownership rate was mostly explained by a loss of population without a licence during the pandemic:

Queensland has experienced strong growth in licence holders at the same time as a decline in population aged 20-29 during the pandemic years. This might be the product of departing temporary immigrants partly offset by interstate migration to Queensland.

New South Wales appears to follow this pattern also, although there has been strong growth in licence holders for teenagers in recent years.

To illustrate how important migration is to the composition of young adults living in Australia, here’s a look at the age profile of net international immigration over time for Australia:

For almost all years, the age band 20-24 has had the largest net intake of migrants. This age band also saw declining rates of driver’s licence ownership – until the pandemic, when there was a big exodus and at the same time a significant increase in the drivers licence ownership rate. The younger adult age bands have seen a surge since 2022, and in the three states with data the licence ownership rates have dropped.

Here’s another view of this issue – Australia population by age band, showing clear dips in 16-29 year-olds during the pandemic:

For completeness, here are licence ownership rate charts for other age groups:

There appear to be a few dodgy outlier data points for the Northern Territory (2019) and South Australia (2016). I’m also a little suspicious about the massive uptick in New South Wales from 2022 (which probably explains the national uptick).

Here’s all the age bands for each state:

Motor cycle licence ownership

Motorcycle licence ownership per capita has been declining in most states and territories, except Tasmania.

I suspect dodgy data for New South Wales 2016, and Tasmania 2019. I’ve removed NT prior to 2014, due to reconciliation reasons mentioned above.

Data quality issues – Australian Capital Territory

I have excluded data for the ACT from many charts above because I am concerned about inconsistency and implausibility.

Here are the reported total numbers of licences, and calculations of licencing rates per capita from that data. The blue lines are based on age-band totals, while the orange bands are based on counts of licences by type (BITRE report that the gender-based data includes double-counting so I’ve not included those totals).

The total number of licences by age band has stepped up and down a few times, while the total number of licences has also bounced around. The calculated rate of car licence ownership has varied wildly – including suggesting 6% of the eligible population dropped licence ownership in 2019.

It also suggests much higher rates of licence ownership that anywhere else in Australia in the 1970s which doesn’t seem plausible when every other jurisdiction was showing a steep increase.

Here’s the breakdown of reported licence ownership by age band for the ACT:

Many age bands exceed 100 (more licence holders than population) and there are some odd kinks in the data around 2015-2017 for all age bands (especially 70-79).

BITRE’s Information Sheet 84 (published in 2017) reports that ACT licences might remain active after people leave the territory (e.g. to nearby parts of NSW) because of delays in transferring their licences to another state, resulting in a mismatch between licence holder counts and population. However, New South Wales requires people to transfer their licence within 3 months of moving there, and other states likely do also. But that requirement might be new, changed, and/or differently enforced over time (please contact me if you know more).

Final remarks: It’s easily to complain about poor data quality, but I do empathise with the people responsible for compiling these statistics. No doubt they are dealing with legacy systems and databases that might be hard to query and may or may not have good documentation. Then there’s plenty of room for confusion and double-counting across car, motorcycle, and heavy vehicle licences. And there are so many different types of licences – full, provisional, learners, probationary, restricted, suspended, interim, ordinary, extra-ordinary, etc. I suspect BITRE had many challenges trying to compile consistent data from all jurisdictions. Hopefully with more effort across the jurisdictions the quality could be improved in future. Licence ownership is unsurprisingly a significant driver of travel behaviour, so it is important to report licence holder numbers as accurately as possible.

For less-recent (2015) but more detailed analysis, see the post Trends in driver’s licence ownership in Australia.

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