Housing Accord shortfall has cost states $11 billion in tax, HIA says

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Two years into the National Housing Accord, the Housing Industry Association has put a dollar figure on the homes that were not started. In a release dated 7 October 2026, the builders' body said new home commencements were 94,980 dwellings behind the pace the target requires, and estimated that governments had missed out on $2.8 billion in stamp duty and $8.2 billion in GST as a result.

The release followed the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Building Activity figures for the June quarter of 2026, published the same morning, which closed the second full year of the five-year Accord. The tax numbers are an industry estimate, made by an organisation that argues for lower taxes on new housing, and they should be read that way. The counts of homes underneath them are official, and they show where Queensland stands.

Housing Industry Association release, 7 October 2026; ABS Building Activity, June quarter 2026, seasonally adjusted, as reported by The Urban Developer.

What the industry body counted

The Accord's target is 1.2 million new homes in the five years from 1 July 2024. Spread evenly, that is 240,000 a year, or 480,000 after two years. The Urban Developer, reporting the release on 7 October, gave the commencement figures behind the association's shortfall: 204,502 homes started across Australia in 2025-26 and 180,518 the year before. Together that is 385,020 starts, which leaves the 94,980 gap the association quotes.

From that gap the association derives three estimates. It says the missing homes represent $45 billion of economic activity that did not take place. It says they could have housed about 242,160 people, on average household sizes. And it says the two taxes most directly tied to a new home, stamp duty and GST, would have raised $11 billion between them over the two years.

The association adds one more comparison: by its estimate, the forgone revenue could have paid for 43,455 essential workers across Australia over the same period. The release was issued in the name of the association's managing director, Jocelyn Martin, who put the argument in a sentence. "New housing is revenue positive to government," she said.

How far the estimate can be tested

The release does not publish its working. It says only that the tax figures reflect state and territory taxation regimes, and it gives no breakdown by state, so there is no Queensland share of the $11 billion to report.

Simple division gives a sense of scale. Spread across 94,980 homes, $45 billion of activity is about $474,000 a home, and $11 billion of tax is about $116,000 a home, of which roughly $86,000 is GST and $29,000 is stamp duty. Those are averages implied by the association's own totals, not figures it has stated.

Two other points matter when reading the number. The first is that the Accord's target is to build homes, and the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, the Commonwealth's advisory body, tracks progress by completions. The association has measured starts, which run ahead of completions, and its release gives no completions figure. On completions the gap is wider: 355,817 homes were finished nationally in the two years, according to the ABS figures reported by The Urban Developer, which is 124,183 short of 480,000. The second is that the Housing Industry Association is itself a party to the Accord. The Commonwealth Treasury lists it among the parties to the agreement, with Master Builders Australia and the Property Council of Australia, alongside governments, superannuation funds and institutional investors.

Queensland is third for completions

The same report gives two-year completion totals for the five largest states. Victoria leads, New South Wales follows, and Queensland is third.

Queensland's 68,694 is 19.3 per cent of the national total of 355,817. That is a little under the state's share of the population, which the Commonwealth Grants Commission puts at 20.6 per cent in its 2026 Update. Victoria, with a smaller population than New South Wales, finished about 20,600 more homes than its larger neighbour.

The direction differs between states as well. The Urban Developer reported that Victoria's two-year total was down from more than 118,000 in the previous two years, and New South Wales's from 95,303, while the national figure edged up from 352,463. The same report quoted the association's senior economist, Tom Devitt, describing New South Wales and Victoria as "more vulnerable" to a slowdown in building because their recoveries had been more tentative.

Queensland against its own share

The Accord itself does not publish a home-by-home quota for each state. The Treasury's page on the agreement speaks of each state achieving "their share" without defining it. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council does define it: its Quarterly Report of 21 August 2026 says state targets are calculated using population shares at the time the Accord was agreed. On that basis the Council estimated that Queensland had built 24 per cent of its share by the March quarter of 2026. The report's summary gives the percentage but not the number of homes.

A published count on the same population basis comes from Urban Taskforce, a developer group, which did the sum in August 2023 using ABS population figures, as reported by Smart Property Investment at the time: Queensland's 20.48 per cent of the population gave it 245,740 of the 1.2 million homes, or 49,148 a year. That figure is an industry calculation, not an official quota, but it reproduces the Council's result: the 59,145 homes finished in the seven quarters to March are 24 per cent of 245,740.

Set against that yardstick, the ABS state tables show a state that is starting homes much faster than it is finishing them.

Starts rose 25.9 per cent between the two years, roughly double the national rise of 13.3 per cent implied by the commencement totals above. In 2025-26 Queensland started about 93 per cent of a full year's population share. Over the two years it is 16,002 starts behind that pace, which is 16.8 per cent of the national gap of 94,980, a smaller slice than its population would suggest.

Completions tell a slower story. They rose 2.5 per cent, and the two-year total of 68,694 is 29,602 short of the 98,296 a population share would require. It amounts to 28 per cent of the five-year figure with 40 per cent of the time gone. The move from the Council's 24 per cent is the June quarter's 9,549 completions added to the same base. To reach 245,740 by June 2029, Queensland would need to finish 177,046 homes in three years, about 59,000 a year, against 34,778 in the year just ended. The national equivalent, reported by The Urban Developer, is 281,395 completions a year for the last three years.

Why forgone GST is not a state-by-state bill

About three quarters of the association's $11 billion is GST, and GST does not behave like a state tax. It is collected by the Commonwealth and handed to the states and territories from a single national pool. The Commonwealth Grants Commission, which advises on the split, explains that the pool is shared according to horizontal fiscal equalisation: states with a weaker capacity to raise their own revenue, or higher costs of providing services, receive more per person, and stronger states receive less.

For 2026-27 the Commission's 2026 Update gives Queensland a relativity of 0.87237. In plain terms the state receives 18.0 per cent of the pool while holding 20.6 per cent of the population, or $3,183 a person.

The practical consequence is that a home not built in Brisbane and a home not built in Melbourne cost the Queensland Budget the same amount of GST. The state's stake in the national pool is still large. Budget Paper 2 of the 2026-27 Queensland Budget, handed down on 23 June by Treasurer David Janetzki, records GST revenue of $19.577 billion for the year, 19.6 per cent of general government revenue of $99.671 billion.

Transfer duty, the tax a state keeps

The other part of the estimate is the tax Queensland calls transfer duty, and this one does stay in the state where the property is. The revenue chapter of Budget Paper 2 puts transfer duty at an estimated $8.671 billion in 2025-26 and a budgeted $8.346 billion in 2026-27, out of total state taxation revenue of $29.676 billion. On those figures, transfer duty is about 28 per cent of everything the state raises in tax, and the papers project it reaching $10.152 billion by 2029-30.

A missing new home does not translate neatly into missing duty, though. Duty is charged when property changes hands, so much of it comes from sales of existing homes, and the total moves with prices and turnover as much as with construction. Queensland has also chosen to forgo duty on part of the new-home market: Budget Paper 2 describes the government as locking into law stamp duty relief for first home buyers on new builds. Where a home that was never built would have gone to such a buyer, there was no duty to lose. The association's national figure cannot show how much of its $2.8 billion relates to Queensland, or to buyers who would have paid in full.

What the next three years have to deliver

The association does not expect the June quarter's improvement to last. Its release says the stronger figures mostly reflect approvals and sales made in 2025, and that the effect of this year's federal tax changes and interest rate rises should show up in building activity in 2027. That is a forecast from an interested party, not a measured result. The Urban Developer noted that national approvals fell 6.1 per cent in August, with apartment approvals down 21.2 per cent.

There is a pipeline to work through first. The ABS counted a record 248,733 homes under construction across Australia at the end of June, of which 152,264 were apartments, townhouses and other attached homes. National completions of that kind of housing were 58.6 per cent higher in the June quarter than a year earlier.

The Budget papers assume the building continues, at a slowing rate. Budget Paper 2 forecasts real dwelling investment in the state to grow 9 per cent in 2025-26, 4 per cent in 2026-27 and 2¾ per cent in 2027-28.

Money also remains on the table under the Accord. The Treasury describes a $3 billion New Home Bonus, paid on performance to states and territories that achieve more than their share of the target, and a $500 million Housing Support Program. Queensland's separate allocation of affordable homes under the agreement is 2,049. The ABS notes that the June quarter figures are preliminary and subject to revision, so the two-year totals may yet move.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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