Micro Apartments in Australia: How Small Each State Allows, and Who Lives in Them

Part of Micro housing in Australia

Are micro apartments in Australia a clever answer to high rents, or just a smaller box at a higher price per square metre?

Do you know how small a new apartment is actually allowed to be where you live?

And what if most of the tiny units you have seen advertised are not legally apartments at all?

Most of them are not. Ahead: what counts as a micro apartment, the minimum apartment size state by state, the legal routes that let smaller units get built, who actually lives in them according to the research, and the design rules that decide whether a small home works or just feels small. It is one chapter of our guide to micro housing in Australia.

What are micro apartments? A working definition

Micro apartments are self-contained homes built small on purpose: a studio or one-bedroom with its own kitchen and bathroom, in a building designed around small homes rather than a large one cut up afterwards.

There is no legal definition in Australia, so the useful thing is to know where the lines usually fall. Most definitions put a micro apartment somewhere under 30 m². Canada’s national housing agency, CMHC, uses 29 m² or less. A 2019 UNSW study of Sydney examples looked at units of 24.5 to 28 m². The range you will often see quoted online, 14 to 32 m², is 150 to 350 square feet converted to metric, an American way of counting, which is why it sits oddly against Australian rules.

Those rules are the interesting part, because in two states a self-contained apartment that small cannot be approved as an apartment at all.

Minimum apartment size in Australia, state by state

There is no national minimum. Each state decides, and only two of them set a total floor area for a new apartment:

State	Smallest new studio	What the rules set instead or as well	Source
NSW	35 m² (1-bed 50, 2-bed 70, 3-bed 90)	2.7 m ceilings, a window of at least 10% of each room’s floor area, living rooms at least 3.6 m wide in a studio	Apartment Design Guide, 4D-1
WA	36 m² (1-bed 47, 2-bed 67, 3-bed 90)	Set as an acceptable outcome, with 2.7 m ceilings and 3.6 m living rooms	R-Codes Volume 2, table 4.3a
VIC	No minimum	Main bedroom 3 × 3.4 m, living area 3.3 m wide and 10 m² in a studio, 8 m³ of storage	Mid-Rise Code Guidelines, 2026
SA	No minimum	Studio living rooms 3.3 m wide, 6 m³ of storage, a 4 m² balcony	Planning and Design Code
QLD	No statewide minimum found	Rooming accommodation rules instead (below)	Planning Queensland

Victoria is the one to watch. A Parliament of Victoria inquiry recommended a minimum apartment size in August 2022. The government’s March 2024 response said it would “explore” the idea, and the Mid-Rise Code that took effect on 16 April 2026 set tighter room sizes but still no overall minimum.

Here is how those numbers line up against the smallest rooms the rules allow, and against our own design:

1. Co-living room, single, minimum NSW, excluding kitchen and bathroom
   12 m²
2. Co-living room, maximum NSW, excluding kitchen and bathroom
   25 m²
3. Studio apartment, minimum NSW Apartment Design Guide
   35 m²
4. Studio apartment, minimum WA R-Codes Volume 2
   36 m²
5. Our micro apartment design Internal area, 4.7 m × 8.8 m
   41.36 m²
6. One-bedroom apartment, minimum WA R-Codes Volume 2
   47 m²
7. One-bedroom apartment, minimum NSW Apartment Design Guide
   50 m²

Why tiny units exist below the minimum: co-living and boarding houses

If New South Wales will not approve a studio under 35 m², how do 25 m² units get built in Sydney? Mostly by being something else in law.

In New South Wales the answer is co-living or a boarding house, both under the Housing SEPP. Each private room must be between 12 m² (16 m² for two people) and 25 m², not counting any private kitchen or bathroom, so a room can carry its own kitchenette and still sit well under the apartment minimum. Before November 2021 the same kind of unit came through the “new generation boarding house” route of an earlier policy, which is the route the UNSW research below looked at.

The categories are easy to confuse, so here they are side by side:

Line item	Micro apartment	Co-living (NSW)	Boarding house (NSW)
Self-contained?	Yes	Room plus shared living	Room plus shared living
Size rule	35 m² studio minimum	Room 12 to 25 m²	Room 12 to 25 m²
Affordability condition	None	None	Affordable in perpetuity
Who runs it	Owner or strata	A manager on call 24 hours	A registered community housing provider
Floor space bonus	None	10%	30%

The NSW planning department’s summary adds that co-living needs at least six rooms, though most schemes have 30 to 40, and that every tenancy runs for at least three months.

Other states draw the line differently. In Queensland, small rooming accommodation of up to five bedrooms and five occupants needs no planning approval in lower-density zones, a concession Planning Queensland says expires on 2 December 2026. In Victoria a rented building with four or more residents is a rooming house, as Victoria Legal Aid explains, with its own minimum standards.

Who actually lives in micro apartments

The honest answer is younger than the marketing suggests.

When UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre surveyed the occupants of recent boarding house developments in central and southern Sydney, it found they were mostly students and younger workers, and that 9 in 10 of the low-income occupants were still in rental stress. A companion UNSW thesis on 24.5 to 28 m² units reached a blunter verdict: more supply, compromised amenity, and no clear affordability benefit.

Purpose-built projects can reach further. Nightingale’s building in Marrickville, reported by the ABC, has 54 units of about 25 m² rented at 80 per cent of market rent, with income caps and about one in five homes set aside for priority groups. Its shared kitchens and roof terraces are what make the small private rooms work, and ArchitectureAU reported 177 applicants for the first homes. In Perth, the City of Vincent saw a seven-storey co-living building of 88 small apartments approved in June 2025.

Further afield, when Canada’s housing agency evaluated a Vancouver micro-suite building, 84 per cent of tenants said they were satisfied or neutral about living there. Its own caution is worth repeating: micro does not always mean affordable.

Small-home design: what makes a micro apartment work

The New South Wales rules read, in the end, like a design checklist for a good small home, and they are worth borrowing wherever you are:

• Height. Ceilings of at least 2.7 m in habitable rooms. Volume is the cheapest way to make a small floor plan feel generous.
• Daylight. Every habitable room needs a window in an outside wall of at least 10 per cent of its floor area, and daylight cannot be borrowed from another room.
• Depth. A room no deeper than 2.5 times its ceiling height, and an open-plan layout no more than 8 m from a window.
• Width. A studio’s living room at least 3.6 m wide, so it cannot be made small by being made narrow.
• Storage. At least 4 m³ in a studio beyond the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom storage, half of it inside the home. Victoria asks for 8 m³.
• Outside. A studio balcony of at least 4 m².

Our own micro apartment design starts from the same list and pushes on height: 41.36 m² with 3.6 m ceilings, a bathroom raised on a platform and a bed that rolls away underneath it, so the least-used part of the home stops taking up floor space during the day. You can walk through it in 3D.

Are micro apartments a good idea? The honest answer

They are a good idea in a narrow set of places, and a poor one outside them.

They work where the location is doing the heavy lifting: near transport, work and study, with shared space that makes up for the private space given away, and at a size that still passes the rules above. They fail when size is the only thing on offer. When the ABC visited a Brisbane house split into five micro apartments renting for upwards of $400 a week, Tenants Queensland’s Penny Carr was blunt: at that price, it is not affordable housing.

So the case for micro apartments is not that small is cheap. It is that the mix of homes Australia builds is badly skewed towards large ones, which we set out with the affordability numbers in housing affordability and the size of the homes we build. Micro apartments are one way to fix the mix. Small lots are another, and the cost of splitting a block is in what it costs to subdivide land. If you want to be on the development side of new small homes rather than paying retail for one, that is what buying at developer cost price is about.

Sources

1. Apartment Design Guide — NSW Department of Planning, accessed September 2026
2. State Planning Policy 7.3, Residential Design Codes Volume 2: Apartments — Western Australian Planning Commission, accessed September 2026
3. Inquiry into apartment design standards — Parliament of Victoria, accessed September 2026
4. State Environmental Planning Policy (Housing) 2021 — NSW Legislation, accessed September 2026
5. Affordable rental housing policy not delivering for low-income earners — UNSW Newsroom, accessed September 2026
6. First tenants prepare to move into Marrickville micro apartments — ABC News, accessed September 2026