HILDA: Understanding Australian families for more than 20 years

Every respondent gets a set of carefully designed questionnaires, that ask objective as well as more subjective questions across a range of topics.

For example, parents and guardians in the 2024 survey were asked not just how many children were living in their household, but also how those children were faring in school and how easy it was to access childcare in the last 12 months.

The survey’s co-director, Professor Roger Wilkins described the significance of a study of this nature.

The turn of the millennia in Australia saw a new enthusiasm for evidence-based policy. Despite this eagerness, the country was lacking the appropriate data needed to fulfill such an approach.

A major review of welfare policies in 1999 included budget funding for a nationally representative survey, focussed on tracking changes in Australian households.

Following a public tender, The Melbourne Institute, under the leadership of Professor Mark Wooden, was awarded the contract in association with the Australian Institute of Family Studies and the Australian Council for Educational Research. By 2001, interviewers were sent out across the country, reaching almost 14 000 people in the first survey alone.

At the time, the project was only budgeted for three years, but more than two decades later, there’s been 22 waves of data released.

By the early 2010s, HILDA had been recognised internationally and was being used by researchers across the world to compare the lives of Australians to their international counterparts. In addition to the initial group surveyed, more than 2000 new households were added during the 11^th wave of interviews. This allowed immigrants who had arrived between 2001 and 2011 to be represented in the dataset, though in the most recent report, the Institute conceded that migrants that have arrived since 2011 are vastly underrepresented in HILDA’s data today. This is being rectified by a new sample of immigrants being added in 2024 and 2025.

When Professor Ross Williams released The Policy Providers: A History of the Melbourne Institute in 2012, he described HILDA as “one of the most important and influential projects in economics, and more generally in the social sciences, in Australia in the last 50 years.”

The data gathered has been the basis of thousands of articles, studies, papers and reports from across the spectrum of social science, economics and policy.

Crucially, the HILDA results are available to any researcher, which means that the work of the Institute directly enables not just their own analysis, but academic research all across the globe.

In 2024 alone, the survey helped find predictors of loneliness in Australian men; show that higher temperatures significantly affect job security; and, who showed the effects that religion has on a couple’s relationship stability.