Moving to Australia is the easy part. Picking the right city isn't.
Around 700,000 New Zealanders live across the ditch, and thousands more make the move every year. Most default to Sydney, Melbourne or wherever their cousins landed, but the city that suits a surfing sparkie is not the city that suits a gallery-going analyst who flies home every Christmas.
Kiwi Compass starts with who you are: your field of work, your hobbies, where you holiday, and the social life you want. It matches that against the reality of twelve Australian cities and gives you a ranked percentage match, plus the reasoning behind every score, so you can weigh it up yourself rather than trust a black box.
Nine questions plus your own weighting, about two minutes. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
How the matching works
Each city is scored out of 100 across up to twelve factors, and you set the weighting yourself: after the questions, a slider screen asks how much each factor matters to you (0 to 10), your results are ranked accordingly, and a radar graph shows your priorities against your best-matched city. Family, pet and dating factors only switch on when they apply to you.
- Career fitemployment strength for your field in that city
- Lifestyle & hobbiesgeography, climate and venues for what you love doing
- Weather fityour climate preference against 30-year averages
- Getting aroundpublic transport, traffic and bike-friendliness for how you commute
- Family & schoolsschools, education options and family life, when kids are coming
- Petspet-friendly housing, tenancy rules and lifestyle, when pets are coming
- Meeting someonethe singles scene and ease of meeting people, when you're looking
- Social lifefit against the pace and scene you actually want
- Kiwi communityNZ-born residents, as counted in the Census
- Travel connectionsdirect flights to the places you holiday, including trips home
- Pathway fithow well the city supports a stint, study, settling or the citizenship path
- Housing fityour rent or purchase budget against each city's prices and availability
Where the data comes from
Every factor in your results names its source. The city profiles are compiled from official Australian data:
- ABS Census 2021 NZ-born population of each city (country of birth), driving the Kiwi-community factor
- ABS labour statistics employment by industry and region, driving the career-fit factor
- Bureau of Meteorology 30-year climate averages for temperature, rainfall and sunshine hours
- Scheduled airline routes, 2025 direct international coverage from each city's airport, driving the travel factor
Honesty matters more than polish: the dataset is an indicative snapshot. Figures are rounded and compiled at a point in time, not fetched live. A future version will refresh them automatically from the ABS Data API. Use the results to shortlist and compare, then verify the numbers before you book the one-way ticket.