Geography reference

Statistical Areas Level 2

The ABS designed SA2s to approximate communities that interact socially and economically, which is why they are the level most Australian analysis settles on: small enough to be a suburb, big enough that the census still publishes numbers for it.

The 134 SA2s of Australian Capital Territory, drawn from the exact boundaries Vizzie joins your data to — not a picture of them.

How the codes are built

Nine digits, nesting upward through the Australian Statistical Geography Standard: the first digit is the state or territory, and the rest place the area inside its SA3 and SA4. An SA2 therefore carries its whole hierarchy in the code — no lookup needed to roll a table up to SA4.

Names repeat across states. There is a Richmond in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and the ABS distinguishes them only by code, so a name-keyed join will quietly merge them.

What it rolls up into

1. Mesh Block — the smallest ABS unit, around 50 dwellings
2. Statistical Area Level 1 (SA1) — around 400 people
3. Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) — 3,000 to 25,000 people
4. Statistical Area Level 3 (SA3), then Level 4 (SA4)
5. State or territory

Which years exist

The ASGS is rebuilt for each census — 2011, 2016 and 2021 — and SA2 codes were renumbered between editions, not just added to. A 2016-coded dataset will not join to 2021 boundaries on code alone even where the boundary itself did not move.

Vizzie holds the 2021 edition, the current one.

Map a spreadsheet of these

Paste a column of SA2 codes into Vizzie with whatever you measured beside it. Vizzie recognises the code format, joins it to the boundaries above and draws the map — no shapefile, no download, no GIS install.

Open Vizzie

Boundaries: Australian Bureau of Statistics — ASGS 2021 Statistical Areas Level 2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International).
Licence: CC-BY-4.0. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Boundary counts and sizes measured from the data Vizzie holds, 2026-09-19.