Australia's mothers and babies

Place of birth refers to the setting that a baby was born in. The National Perinatal Data Collection defines a home birth as one that is planned to take place at a home and is attended by a midwife or other medical professional.

Almost all births in Australia took place in hospitals (97%). Of mothers who gave birth in hospital, nearly 3 in 4 (74%) did so in a public hospital. A small proportion of mothers gave birth elsewhere, including birth centres (1.6%), at home (0.6%), or in other settings (such as before arrival at hospital) (0.9%).

Despite hospital-based settings being a common aspect of most births, there are many different models of maternity care that women experience. This issue is covered in more depth in Maternity models of care in Australia.

Figure 1 presents data on the place of birth of women who gave birth, by selected maternal characteristics, for 2022. Select the trend button to see how data has changed over a 13-year period (where available).

Figure 1: Proportion of women who gave birth, by place of birth and selected topic

In 2022, women were more likely to give birth at home if they:

• were aged 30 to 34 years or 35 to 39 years (both 0.7%)
• had a parity of 2 or 3 (0.9%)
• lived in Inner regional areas (0.8%) or in the least disadvantaged areas (0.8%).

In recent years, there has been a slight year-on-year increase in the number of home births (from 0.3% (923) in 2019 to 0.6% (1,787) in 2022). Due to the small numbers of home births, and variation between jurisdictions, these data should be interpreted with caution.

Birth centre births were lowest amongst mothers who were born overseas (1.4%), lived in Inner regional areas (1.1%) or lived in the most disadvantaged areas (1.2%).

For more information on place of birth see National Perinatal Data Collection annual update data tables 2.20, 2.21 and 2.22 and National Perinatal Data Collection annual update data visualisations table 3.1.