Geelong: Victoria's #1 Growth City for the Fourth Year Running

Geelong gained another 3662 residents in 2025, totalling 13,497 net residents over four years. We break down the new data just released from the ABS and combine with data from findamover.com.au to investigate who's moving there, where from, and why.

10 min read

Key takeaways

• Geelong is Victoria's #1 gaining region for the fourth consecutive year, ranking second nationally out of 103 measured regions.
• 13,497 net residents gained over four years — and the MoveFlow Index has strengthened from 1.23 to 1.34, meaning the ratio is improving, not fading.
• Melbourne is the engine: 54% of all 2025 arrivals came from Greater Melbourne, with the Western Suburbs and the inner-north and inner-west both contributing heavily for different reasons.
• Geelong actually loses residents interstate — net -540 to other states — but gains roughly 20 from Melbourne for every one it loses to Queensland.
• The coast is not incidental: Ocean Grove ranks as the third most popular destination suburb despite sitting 25km from the Geelong CBD, with the Bellarine Peninsula drawing nearly one in ten inbound moves.
• Find a Mover platform data confirms it: 50% of all Geelong-related bookings on the platform are inbound moves from outside the region — the trucks are telling the same story as the census.

Every time a removalist truck rolls out of Melbourne and down the M1 towards Geelong, it adds one more data point to what is now a four-year pattern. Geelong gained 3,662 net residents in 2025 alone — and the ratio of people arriving versus leaving has improved every single year since 2022.

New analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics Regional Internal Migration Estimates, combined with real-world moving data from findamover.com.au, shows that Geelong's growth story is neither a pandemic anomaly nor a statistical quirk. It is a structural shift in how Victorians think about where to live.

The numbers place Geelong second nationally out of 103 measured regions, and first in Victoria for the fourth consecutive year — ahead of Gippsland, Ballarat, and every other regional centre competing for Melbourne's overflow.

Analysis of Find a Mover's platform moving data underpins the report's real-world signal.

Four years of consistent growth

The raw headline — 3,662 net new residents in a single year — understates the scale of what is happening. Over four years, Geelong has absorbed a cumulative 13,497 net internal migrants before counting overseas arrivals or natural population growth. That is roughly an entire suburb's worth of new residents, all choosing Geelong over every other option available to them.

More telling than the volume is the direction of the ratio. When the pandemic-era surge subsided and total move volumes pulled back from their 2022 peak, the MoveFlow Index did not retreat with them. It held at 1.34 across both 2024 and 2025 — the highest on record for the city.

This pattern aligns with what Find a Mover observes in real time through its platform. Of all Geelong-related moving jobs posted on the platform over the past three years, 50% are inbound moves from another region against 36% outbound — a ratio of 1.4 to 1. The remaining 14% are moves within Geelong itself, a figure that likely understates true local movement given that short within-city relocations are more likely to be self-managed. The platform is disproportionately capturing the larger relocations from outside the region. The ABS data and the booking data are telling the same story.

The Melbourne pipeline

The story of Geelong's growth is really a story about Melbourne. Of the 14,318 people who moved to Geelong in 2025, 7,742 came from Greater Melbourne — 54% of all arrivals from a single metropolitan area. The net gain from Melbourne alone (+3,222) accounts for 88% of Geelong's total net migration. Remove the Melbourne flow and Geelong is still growing, just modestly.

Within Melbourne, the geography is not even. The Western Suburbs — Point Cook, Werribee, Melton etc — sent 2,728 people to Geelong in 2025, more than all of Geelong's interstate arrivals combined. That figure has a straightforward geographic logic: the M1 Princes Freeway connects Wyndham directly to Geelong, and residents of those outer western suburbs are already accustomed to looking that way for value.

Find a Mover's platform data drills the Melbourne story down to suburb level, and two distinct migration types become visible. The first group is geographic: Werribee and Point Cook are the two largest single Melbourne origins for Geelong-bound moves — outer-west suburbs sitting directly on the M1 corridor, where Geelong is the natural next step down the freeway. These are movers following the geography. The second group tells a different story. Yarraville, Brunswick, Northcote, Reservoir, Footscray, and Preston all feature prominently — Melbourne's inner-north and inner-west, the suburbs that got more expensive over the past decade and are now pricing out the very demographic that made them desirable. These are not commuter-belt pragmatists. They are inner-city renters and owners who have been squeezed out of their own neighbourhoods and are choosing Geelong where they get space, a house, a backyard — over a lateral move to another crowded postcode.

Beyond Melbourne: who else is moving to Geelong?

Geelong is net-positive against every major regional Victorian centre. It functions as a step-up destination for people from smaller regional towns — offering the services and employment of a major city while remaining more affordable and lifestyle-oriented than Melbourne. The Warrnambool and Ballarat flows are particularly large, reflecting Geelong's role as the gravitational centre of western Victoria.

Interstate arrivals total around 2,200 — modest compared to the Melbourne flow, but spread across every capital. Sydney leads with 367 arrivals, followed by Brisbane (316), Adelaide (250), and Perth (235).

The counterintuitive finding: Geelong loses interstate — and it doesn't matter

Here is the detail that gets overlooked in any surface-level reading of Geelong's growth: on a pure interstate basis, the city is a net loser. More people leave Geelong for other states (4,402) than arrive from them (3,862) — a net interstate loss of 540 residents. Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast are the primary draws.

Geelong leads Victoria — and the gap is widening

Geelong's net gain of +3,662 is not just the largest in Victoria — it exceeds the combined net gains of the second and third-ranked regions, Gippsland and Ballarat. Its MoveFlow Index of 1.34 is also the highest of any Victorian region, meaning Geelong is not simply growing because it is large. It is growing proportionally faster than every competitor.

Why people are migrating to Geelong

Five factors appear consistently across both the ABS data and Find a Mover's platform analytics. They reinforce each other, which is part of what makes Geelong's growth story so durable.

1. Affordability

This is the engine. Analysis of moving jobs on the Find a Mover platform shows that people moving to Geelong are arriving from properties with an average value of $864,000 and landing in Geelong homes averaging $773,000 — a gap of around $91,000 on a like-for-like basis. These values are estimated by matching each move's origin and destination suburb, property type, and bedroom count against CoreLogic median pricing data — the same methodology used across Find a Mover's recent property ladder analysis of the capital cities. For many inbound movers, that difference isn't just a saving. It's the margin that allows them to upsize, reduce their mortgage, or both. People leaving Geelong tell the opposite story: outbound movers head to properties averaging $900,000, paying a premium to relocate within higher-cost markets.

2. You can still get to Melbourne

Geelong's commutability is a feature, not a compromise. The Geelong V/Line service is the most-used regional rail line in Victoria, carrying 10.22 million passengers in FY2023-24 — and that number grew a further 13% in 2024-25. The Wyndham Vale stations alone added over 208,000 extra passengers in a single year, more than some entire regional lines elsewhere in the state. The line now runs every 20 minutes on weekends following a major duplication upgrade completed in late 2024. For the significant share of new arrivals who still work in Melbourne part of the week, the commute is increasingly viable rather than merely tolerable.

3. The coast is the point

Not everyone moving to Geelong is choosing the city itself. Find a Mover platform data shows that the two most popular destination suburbs after the Geelong CBD are both coastal. Torquay — the gateway to the Surf Coast — accounts for 7% of all Geelong-bound moves, and Ocean Grove on the Bellarine Peninsula accounts for a further 6.1%. Add Leopold at 3.2%, and with Anglesea and Jan Juc both cracking the top 20, more than one in 5 inbound moves lands directly in a coastal suburb other than central Geelong, despite those suburbs sitting 25–30km from the Geelong CBD.

That is not a coincidence of geography. It is a deliberate lifestyle choice. People are not moving to Geelong and reluctantly ending up coastal. A significant share are moving specifically for the coast and treating the city as the infrastructure around it.

4. The employment base has diversified

Geelong's manufacturing roots have been well documented. Less discussed is the extent to which the city has rebuilt around education, health, and professional services over the past decade. Deakin University anchors two Geelong campuses and is one of the largest employers in the region. The health precinct around University Hospital Geelong has expanded substantially. The result is that more people can now live and work in Geelong full-time rather than treating it purely as a commuter base, reducing the friction of the move and broadening the pool of people for whom it makes sense.

5. Four years of proof creates its own momentum

Migration research consistently shows that the single strongest predictor of a move destination is knowing someone who has already made it successfully. Geelong now has tens of thousands of recent arrivals who serve as that reference point for their Melbourne networks. The city's reputation has shifted from "regional alternative" to "proven choice" — and that shift, once established, tends to compound rather than reverse.

What this means for Geelong

Gaining 13,497 net residents over four years has real consequences for a city. The growth story is positive — but sustained population inflows at this scale create pressures that need managing if Geelong is to keep the advantages that attracted people in the first place.

Housing supply will be tested

With 14,000+ arrivals annually, Geelong needs continued residential development to avoid creating the same affordability pressures people are fleeing Melbourne to escape. That would directly undermine the city's single biggest competitive advantage. Early signs of price convergence in the Bellarine Peninsula and Surf Coast corridor are worth watching closely. If Geelong loses its $91,000 price gap with Melbourne, the migration pipeline weakens with it.

Infrastructure pressure is already building

The M1 Princes Freeway, V/Line services, and local roads will face intensifying demand — particularly given that a significant proportion of new residents still commute to Melbourne part of the week. 

The Melbourne relationship is everything

Geelong's growth story is, in a very real sense, Melbourne's story. Of every net resident Geelong gained in 2025, 88 cents in the dollar came from Greater Melbourne. Any policy or economic change that affects Melbourne's liveability, housing costs, or transport connections to Geelong will flow directly into this migration pipeline. The city's fortunes are structurally linked to its larger neighbour in a way that no other Victorian regional centre can claim to the same degree.

For now, the direction is clear. Geelong is not a pandemic story with a correction pending. Four consecutive years of strengthening ratios, confirmed by both ABS census-derived estimates and real-world moving data from findamover.com.au, point to a city that has genuinely reset its place in the Victorian urban hierarchy.