Moving house is widely regarded as stressful, yet approximately 17 per cent of the Australian population moves each year, according to a new survey released this week.
The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research is the result of three consecutive years' survey covering 7,682 households and 19,914 individuals, with adult members of each household interviewed annually.
The report shows that 25.3 per cent of the people who were interviewed in all three years had moved house at least once since their first interview in 2001.
The overall average time spent at the current address is about ten years, but people between the ages of 20 and 35 stay in the same place for shorter periods than older people.
The average length of time for a 25 to 34 year old to stay in one home is around four years, compared to approximately 20 years for those over the age of 65.
The HILDA Survey shows that frequency of moving house is related mainly to income, age and whether children are part of the household.
The average time spent in one house is slightly lower for people in high income households. People in the lowest income sector stay in the same place for an average of around 12 years, compared to eight or nine years for people with high household incomes.
However, this changes with age.
For younger people (aged 20-24), those with the highest household incomes stay in one place for the longest. In the 25 to 34 age group, household income doesn't seem to affect time in current residence --the median for all but the lowest quintile is around 2 years.
For people aged 35 to 44, it is those in the middle income quintile who stay in one place the longest, and for people aged between 45 and 64, those in the lowest income quintile have the shortest median time at their current residence.
It was found that the age of the children in the household appears to be related to how long people stay in one place.
With the exception of group households, which are usually temporary arrangements, people with children under the age of 15 move most often. Lone parents with children under 15, who often face severe financial pressures, are the most frequent movers of all.
In 2003, the average time in their current residence for a couple with children under 15 was 7 years, compared to 13.3 years for a couple without children under 15. Lone parents with children under 15 had stayed in their current residence for an average of 5.5 years, compared to 12.1 years for lone parents whose children were 15 and over.
People with young children moved around a lot more than people without children. While those with no children living in the household had lived in their current home for 11 to 13 years on average, people with children under four years old had lived in their current residence for just four or five years.
Plainly, parents with growing children need to increase their housing space and the number of bedrooms as the children mature. They may also want to move closer to preferred schools.
Other factors that may impact on the housing tenure of parents of young children include the impact of home purchase and child bearing, and that they are likely to have formed a relationship more recently than parents of older children.
Another factor that affects how often people move is whether they own their home or rent - as expected, people who owned their own home or were paying off a mortgage had lived in the same place for longer than those who were renting.
For people who owned their home outright or were paying off a mortgage, the average number of years in their current residence was 13 in 2003. On the other hand, the average time spent in one home for people who were renting was only 3.6 years.
