Why is Everyone Leaving Australia?

221,000 people left Australia last year and countless others are preparing to exit Australia quietly. Australia didn't collapse, it just stopped feeling like home for many. And we asked our clients about it and they told us the reasons why they left Australia and we're going to tell you now.

Hi everyone, it's Irena here from Millennial Migrant. We've been flooded with inquiries from Australians in 2025, especially during summer. So, we were curious and we asked all of the clients and the prospects on why are they leaving Australia? And their answers actually revealed kind of a pattern.

The one that is really hard to ignore. So, if you feel priced out, over regulated, or culturally disconnected to Australia, believe me, you're not imagining it and you're not alone in it.

Professionals, families, business owners, people who love Australia are actually seeing the same thing you're seeing and are preparing to exit. In just a few years, life actually changed very drastically. So, for example, typical family now spends around 45% of their income just on mortgage. Just

for reference, back in 2020, it was 26%. It's getting even worse in major cities like, for example, Sydney where the family spent up to 68% of household income on mortgage. Renters feel it, too, honestly. So, vacancy uh is under 1% in major cities like Sydney or Canberra and others.

A 100,000 US dollar income used to be very comfortable and you shouldn't really struggle if you have that much of an income. But, it's that's not the case at the moment in Australia. What we get from our clients is that people aren't really leaving because they dislike Australia. They're leaving because they

feel stuck in Australia with the cost of living, with the housing pressure, slow wage growth, and others. They It kind of create a bottleneck on life. I remember back in the days, and I did talk about that with the client just the other day, that Australia once was kind of a land of opportunities, at least for us in

Europe. It was always You always hear of your aunt from Australia or somebody like that, and you always imagine what a beautiful life they've had. Well, none of us who no longer have aunts in Australia. They all pretty much left because of the different reasons as well, but we're going to go through some

of them. The first thing that creates a problem today uh are the banks in Australia. Not a lot of people know that, especially I mean, obviously Australians probably know, but it's getting very, very difficult to move your money outside of Australia, which is pretty normal from the Australian government point of view.

They're afraid of capital flying out and capital exiting uh Australia and the wealth exiting Australia, but there are currently very massive AML or CTF expansions, crypto exchanges, banks, accountants, pretty much everyone are all right now under stricter reporting, and the cross-border

transfers are flagged much more often, and it takes uh weeks for them to arrive to your bank account that's outside of Australia. Freedom over your own money feels less free in Australia.

So, the Australian Tax Office or ATO scans around 500,000 plus bank records per year, and every international transfer triggers reporting, no matter the amount, whether it's $500, whether it's 000.