This data answers a range of questions, including:
- What are the current land uses (building types, floor space usage, business activities)?
- What sort of businesses and industries are located in the City of Melbourne and how fast are they growing?
- What are the key trends in employment, business and development and residential sector expansion?
- What are the changes in land use?
Participation is confidential and published census results do not provide specific details about individual businesses. CLUE's success depends on the participation of all businesses.
What does CLUE data cover?
CLUE data includes:
- industry structure and type (ANZSIC code and number of establishments or business locations)
- floor space type and use (office, retail, industrial, accommodation or entertainment and office vacancy rates)
- employment type (full-time, part-time, casual or contractor)
- building information (number of floors, year of construction, gross floor area and lettable area)
- venue and capacity measures (cafe or restaurant seats, child care centre spaces, off-street car parking spaces, bicycle and shower facilities, residential dwellings, student dwellings, student beds, theatre and stadium seats, conference and meeting seats and gaming machines)
- spatial distribution (maps, CLUE small areas, blocks and customised regions).
Complementary sources of economic data
The City of Melbourne’s Census of Land Use and Employment (CLUE) provides detailed data on land, floor space, and hyper-local geography. To enhance our LGA-based economic data and benchmarking capabilities we also use the Economy.id Economic ProfileOpens in new tab which gives us a detailed understanding of key economic indicators and enables us to benchmark against other capital cities and regions.
CLUE and Economy.id provide different ways of measuring the employment of an area, all of which give an insight into the local economy and its growth rate over time.
CLUE counts businesses, floor space and jobs that occupy commercial space in the municipality (‘on-site’ jobs). Employment counts in Economy.idOpens in new tab, which are modelled on the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census and Labour Force Survey data, offer a more comprehensive picture by including groups not counted in CLUE, such as home-based businesses, temporary construction workers, and transient workers.
Each of these datasets has different strengths and the most appropriate dataset will depend on the kind of information needed. For more information, visit the Employment Summary on the Economy.id profile.Opens in new tab
The City of Melbourne has been collecting land use and employment data since 1962. Originally collected on a five-yearly basis, since 2000 it has been collected every two years.
Changes to CLUE collection over time
| Census year | Census area | Major improvements | No. of business locations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1962 | CBD | first time – paper based | |
| 1982 | CBD | computer database, industry classification | 7532 |
| 1992 | central city | expansion of census area to central city | 6744 |
| 1997 | central city | capacity measures included | 6872 |
| 2000 | central city | computer mapping, website launched | 7399 |
| 2002 | municipality | contractors and volunteers categories | 12,134 |
| 2004 | municipality | space use measurement in m squared | 12,536 |
| 2006 | municipality | conversion to ANZSIC 2006 | 13,943 |
| 2008 | municipality | 15,358 | |
| 2010 | municipality | occupancy history, operating hours, accessibility of public buildings | 15,965 |
| 2012 | municipality | bicycle/shower facilities | 16,335 |
| 2018 | municipality | cloud-based database, digital data collection | 16,768 |
Every commercial property will be surveyed at least once every two years.
The City of Melbourne releases an annual update that collates data from the previous two years.
The next update will be released in 2024.
A team of census officers visits every establishment in every building in the City of Melbourne. The census generally involves an officer visiting businesses during normal operating hours to ask details about their business and premises.
Information collected includes trading name, activity description, a space type code, number of employees, number of parking spaces and capacity measures.
For further information see:
If you can’t find the data you require in the reports we provide, you can submit a request for a customised report.
The cost is calculated at $220 per hour, including GST. We will advise you of the exact cost before the data is produced, and will only supply the customised data once you have accepted our quote.
No, although if you would like to map and analyse the information yourself, you can download geospatial map layers in shapefile format for CLUE small areas and blocks data.
You’ll need to perform a spatial join to append CLUE data attributes to these map layers.
- Please refer to CLUE small area and block maps.
Some data is considered confidential and therefore not released. This includes employment and floor space occupied by individual businesses. Data that is public knowledge, such as trading names, is not confidential.
Customised data is usually presented as a table in Excel format, but this can depend on the request.
The latest full dataset is CLUE 2022 – this data was collected between July 2021 and December 2022.
