Best place in Australia for seniors

They say the later stages of your life are the ‘golden years’, where you can retire and relax. Ideally, these years will be happy and mostly worry-free, but life is not always so simple. Health concerns, and the prospects of being lonely can add a degree of stress that dull the shine of these golden years. 

At iSelect, we know how much good health is important while the feeling of isolation, and available care facilities can impact happiness and quality of life in the sunset years of one’s life. 

With this in mind, we ranked Australia’s states based on factors like the number of seniors living alone, how they rate their health and stress, life expectancy, average ratings for aged care facilities, and the number of retirement homes per state.  

Read the rankings below to see how each state fares. 

The best states for seniors’ health and happiness in Australia

The Australian Capital Territory was ranked as the best state for Australian seniors’ health and happiness with a score of 6.85/10. They scored the best in three out of six metrics, and with good scores in two others. The ACT had the highest proportion of Australian seniors (those aged 65 and above) rating their health as excellent or very good at 43.2%, as well as the largest group of elderly who rated their stress as ‘very low’ at 74.2%. The ACT also had the longest average life expectancy at 81.7 years, narrowly beating out Western Australia and Victoria.  

The ACT had the second-lowest number of seniors living alone after the Northern Territory, with 3,195.97 per 100,000 of the state’s entire population. One factor the ACT didn’t do well in was the low number of 35 retirement homes in the state. 

Following behind the ACT, states that performed well were New South Wales and Victoria, which scored 6.20 and 5.29 respectively. New South Wales had the highest number of retirement homes at 758, the third-highest proportion of seniors who rate their health highly at 40.9%, and the fourth-highest life expectancy at 81.2 years.  

Victoria had the third-highest number of retirement homes with 425, Queensland only narrowly beating them with 477. Victoria also came in third-highest for life expectancy (81.5 years) and for their star rating for aged care facilities in the state (3.81).  

However, Victoria also had the lowest amount of elderly people who said their health was in very good condition, at 32.4%. 

The lowest-ranked out of the states and territories was Tasmania, Western Australia and Queensland. Tasmania scored 4.76, followed by Western Australia with 4.92 and Queensland at 5.08. 

Tasmania had the second-lowest number of retirement homes with 59, and the second-lowest life expectancy at 80.2. The state also had the second-lowest number of seniors who said they were in good health at 36.2%, as well as the highest number of seniors living alone per capita at 6,329.28. 

Looking at a few other troubling stats, Queensland’s elderly reported they’re feeling the most stress out of all states and territories, with only 67.7% saying they had little stress in their lives. When it comes to star ratings for aged care facilities, South Australia and Western Australia both tied with the lowest average star rating at 3.64 each. 

Conclusion

With a growing elderly population, the topic of providing options and support to seniors so they can live healthy, happy lives is growing more important, and the conversation is not one to be put off until retirement.  

Knowing what you want from your senior years is important so that you can plan for it, and a key factor in that is health. Tellingly, no state or territory had more than 50% of those aged 65 and above who rated their health as very good or excellent.