Alcohol available for consumption in Australia

What is ‘alcohol available for consumption’?

This publication quantifies the amount of alcohol being made available to people living in Australia every year. Rather than measuring the drinking habits of individuals, this collection examines the availability of alcohol across Australia. While this does not allow for examination of results below the national level, or for disaggregations by priority population groups, it does allow for long-term trends in the total amount of beer, wine, cider and spirits entering the Australian community to be examined.

‘Alcohol available for consumption’ was previously referred to as ‘Apparent consumption of alcohol’. All estimates are generated as part of the Apparent Consumption of Alcohol collection.

While the total amount of alcohol being made available in a given year does not directly translate to individual consumption patterns, changes in availability are likely to reflect broad changes in consumption patterns. Trends in availability are therefore useful for indicating whether the Australian community is drinking more or less alcohol on average than previously, and how different beverage types have contributed to the total amount of alcohol being consumed.

Results within this publication should be interpreted in relation to the time-series rather than used for absolute values of the amount of alcohol that was consumed each year, due to limitations in the data sources and assumptions made:

• The collection assumes that all alcohol that was produced or imported in a given financial year was consumed in the same financial year.
• No data is available to account for beverages that may have been wasted, used in cooking, cellared, or otherwise not consumed.
• The collection does not account for beverages that were purchased overseas and brought into the country duty-free.

Previous publications

This report presents the most up-to-date estimates as generated by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). This release replaces the previous estimates which ran from 1944–45 to 2019–20 and released on 17 October 2023.

This publication is a continuation of the long-running Apparent Consumption of Alcohol, Australia series previously run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). For an explanation of the previous calculation methods, see the ABS website (2019).

Revisions to results published in the previous release

Results in this publication are subject to change as data sources are updated and revised over time.

As a result of using Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) to project total wine sales, volumes for individual wine categories cannot be estimated directly. This release marks the first time that sales data was obtained by the AIHW and used to estimate the proportions of red wine, white wine, sparkling wine, fortified and dessert wines and vermouth. Previous estimates were based on simple projections from prior years.

Evidence shows that the proportion of white wine being sold in Australia has decreased over time, while the proportion of red wine has increased. This has resulted in changes to estimates of different wine categories since the previous release, however the overall volume of wine and volume of alcohol from wine did not change substantially from prior releases.

Additionally, this is the first release to incorporate results from the 2022 National Health Survey (ABS 2023). This has resulted in small changes to wine and cider estimates from 2018–19 and 2019–20 due to updated projections for those years.

All estimates that have changed since the previous publication of this report are indicated with a ‘†’ in the data tables.