Where People Are Moving To In Tasmania In 2026

Tasmania's population barely grew in the 2024-25 financial year, adding just 1,496 people statewide, a 0.3% gain that was the slowest of any state or territory in the country. But that flat topline hides a much sharper truth. On the island, people are leaving the older urban core around Hobart, Glenorchy, and Launceston for the municipalities surrounding them, chasing land, new housing estates, and shorter commutes over city addresses. Net interstate migration has been negative for several consecutive quarters, meaning Tasmania is still losing more people to the mainland than it gains, and net overseas migration is now the only thing keeping the state's population growing at all. Within that shrinking pool of growth, the in-state shuffle is the real story. Sorell, on Hobart's eastern fringe, has posted the fastest municipal growth rate in Tasmania two years running, while Hobart itself, Glenorchy, and Launceston have all lost residents outright. Here are six places absorbing that outward movement, including insight into where their new residents are coming from and why they're making the move.

Sorell

Sorell recorded 1.5% population growth in 2023-24 and 1.4% growth in 2024-25, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' regional population releases, making it the fastest-growing local government area in Tasmania in both years. The municipality's population stood at 16,734 at the 2021 Census and has since been growing faster than any other Tasmanian council. The draw is straightforward. Sorell sits just 26 kilometers east of Hobart's center, close enough for a daily commute, with far more room to build.

The Sorell East Growth Area, a 160-hectare rezoning south of the Arthur Highway near the Sorell Bypass, is planned to deliver 1,400 to 2,000 new homes in stages through 2034, enough to house 3,200 to 4,500 additional residents, alongside a new K-12 school and expanded water and sewerage infrastructure from TasWater. The historic town center, anchored by St George's Anglican Church on Gordon Street, whose current building was completed in 1884, still runs a Sunday market with more than 60 stallholders, and the Sorell Fruit Farm draws pick-your-own visitors each summer, even as new subdivisions spread out from its edges.

Rokeby

Just across the Derwent from Hobart's center, on the city's eastern shore, Rokeby has grown faster than almost anywhere else in Tasmania. The suburb's estimated population reached 9,227 as of the ABS's June 2025 estimate, up from 7,874 at the 2021 Census, a gain of nearly 1,700 people, or better than 4% a year on average. In the 2024-25 financial year alone, ABS data shows Rokeby added roughly 240 residents, a 2.7% increase. Part of the City of Clarence, Rokeby is one of the top landing spots for people leaving Hobart outright.

Of Hobart residents who moved elsewhere in Tasmania between the 2016 and 2021 Censuses, Clarence took in the largest share, at 16.8%, ahead of Glenorchy and Kingborough. Rokeby itself carries a working-class, family-suburb identity built up since the 1970s, when it was developed largely for public housing. Its skate park, built around 2001, is considered one of the best in the state and hosts professional competitions. The Rokeby Historic Trail loops past the old Rokeby House farmstead that gave the suburb its name.

Brighton

Brighton, 27 kilometers north of Hobart along the Midland Highway, added 272 residents in 2023-24, a 1.36% growth rate, one of the highest in the state that year. The municipality's population reached 20,284 in the same period, and Tasmanian government demographic snapshots classify Brighton's growth as driven by both natural increase and net internal migration, a combination shared by few other Tasmanian councils. Brighton has leaned into growth rather than resisting it.

The Brighton Transport Hub is expanding light industrial and logistics activity along the highway corridor, and the Brighton Training Centre, a major thoroughbred and harness-racing facility that relocated from Glenorchy's Elwick Racecourse, has become a significant local employer. The area's history runs deeper than its new housing estates. The old Brighton Barracks, a military site established in the 1820s, once housed Kosovar refugees during the 1999 humanitarian crisis before being subdivided for residential use in the early 2000s, a fitting precedent for a town now absorbing a new wave of arrivals from Hobart and Glenorchy.

Kingston

South of Hobart, Kingston anchors the municipality of Kingborough, which grew by 355 people in 2023-24, an 0.86% increase that brought its population to 41,574. Kingston proper, the suburb rather than the whole council area, is regularly described by state demographers as one of Tasmania's fastest-growing regions. Its 2021 Census population of 12,288 has continued to climb as new residential subdivisions spread toward Huntingfield.

Kingborough is a crossroads for Tasmania's internal migration. It's one of the top three destinations for people leaving Hobart, taking in 12.3% of that outflow, even as a share of Kingborough's own residents keep moving further south into Huon Valley. The Australian Antarctic Division's national headquarters, on the Channel Highway, is Kingston's most distinctive landmark and a major public-sector employer, while Kingston Beach, with its golf course and calm-water swimming, gives the growing suburb a second seaside identity rather than just commuter-belt sprawl.

Huonville

Huonville, the commercial hub of the Huon Valley, about 35 minutes south of Hobart, sits inside a municipality that added 272 residents in 2023-24, a 1.40% growth rate. Government population data shows Huon Valley's growth is now migration-led rather than driven by births. The numbers show exactly where those new residents are coming from: 34.7% moved in from another Tasmanian local government area, with 14.6% arriving from Kingborough alone, another 6.0% from Hobart, and 3.1% from Glenorchy. That pattern fits Huon Valley's role as the next stop in Tasmania's outward migration chain, one step further from the city than Kingborough itself, and cheaper for it.

Huonville's identity is built on the apple industry that shaped the valley for generations. Willie Smith's Apple Shed, part museum and part working cidery with tours and an on-site café, sits just outside town, and the Huon River running through it draws paddlers and small-boat traffic. The Sleeping Beauty peak, part of the Wellington Range, forms a scenic backdrop for a town now filling in with new arrivals from further up the valley toward Hobart.

Legana

Fifteen minutes northwest of Launceston, Legana represents a smaller-scale version of the same pattern playing out in the state's north. West Tamar, the municipality that includes Legana, grew from 25,717 residents in 2021 to 26,136 by June 2025, according to ABS population estimates. It's a modest but real gain even as Launceston itself lost 261 residents in 2023-24 alone, the largest numeric population decline of any local government area in the country that year.

The West Tamar Growth Strategy, adopted by councillors in December 2025, identifies Legana as the municipality's primary growth center, with capacity for 754 additional dwellings, and notes that 56% of the West Tamar workforce commutes into Launceston for work, a dependency the strategy is trying to loosen with local jobs growth. Tamar Island Wetlands, a 60-hectare reserve with a boardwalk and lagoons, sits on Legana's doorstep, and the vineyards and cellar doors along the Tamar Valley wine route, including Velo and its on-site Timbre Kitchen restaurant, have turned the area into a genuine dining and tourism draw of its own, not just a bedroom suburb of Launceston.

Tasmania's Longstanding Growth Pattern

Tasmania's population growth, thin as it is statewide, is concentrated almost entirely in a ring of municipalities on the outer edge of Hobart, with a smaller, similar ring forming around Launceston. Sorell, Brighton, Clarence, Kingborough, and Huon Valley are absorbing people leaving Hobart and Glenorchy, each a little further from the city and a little cheaper than the last. For residents already living in these growth corridors, the practical implications are becoming familiar. They are seeing more subdivisions springing up on the edges of town, longer queues at schools and health services built for smaller populations, and infrastructure upgrades, like the water and sewerage works tied to Sorell's new growth area, racing to keep pace with rezoning. Unless net interstate migration turns positive again, which it hasn't managed in several years, this outward reshuffling within Tasmania, rather than any big new wave of arrivals from the mainland, will keep being the main story of where the state's population is actually headed.