Outer Canberra Suburb Delivers 5.8% Rental Yield, Beats Inner Areas

Canberra’s investor market has a new champion, and it’s not Kingston, Braddon or any of the usual suspects. The suburb of Throsby, in the northern growth corridor of Gungahlin, posted a gross rental yield of 5.8 per cent over the June quarter, the highest for any ACT suburb with more than 50 rental properties, according to CoreLogic data analysed by The Daily Canberra.

Why Throsby is delivering

The suburb, which sits off Horse Park Drive and adjacent to the Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve, has a median house price of about $685,000, well below the ACT median of $835,000. With a median weekly rent of $760, the yield is being driven by a combination of lower entry prices and strong tenant demand from families priced out of Belconnen and the inner north.

Vacancy in the Gungahlin region sat at 0.6 per cent in May, according to the Real Estate Institute of the ACT. That’s tighter than the territory-wide average of 0.9 per cent, putting Gungahlin among the most competitive rental pockets in Canberra. The suburb’s stock is almost entirely made up of detached houses built within the last decade, and it has no major apartment blocks.

“The numbers bear out what agents in the area have been telling us for months, that buyers are looking at this corridor specifically because they can still get a house under $700,000 and see that rent will cover the mortgage,” said a senior analyst at the Property Council of Australia’s ACT division, who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak on the record.

Public servant buyers and the interest-rate factor

Throsby’s appeal is also tied to the makeup of Canberra’s workforce. The suburb sits 20 minutes from the Australian Taxation Office’s main campus in the Civic precinct and 25 minutes from the Department of Defence headquarters at Russell. Many buyers are first-time investors employed in the Australian Public Service, a cohort that has not seen major job cuts in this cycle and continues to offer stable tenancy.

The 2026 federal budget, handed down in May, confirmed a 2.1 per cent average pay rise for public servants and maintained staffing levels across most agencies. For investors, that translates to a tenant pool with secure income, a rarity in markets reliant on tourism or construction work.

The ACT government’s decision last year to rezone land along the proposed light-rail stage 2A corridor, which will eventually link the city centre to Woden, has not yet affected Throsby, but agents say the suburb’s growth story is already baked in. Gungahlin already has light rail, and the extension to the far north is being considered for the next decade.

The county’s auction clearance rate hovered around 65 per cent through June, according to Domain, meaning one in three properties fails to sell under the hammer. In Throsby, however, private-treaty sales are the norm, with 80 per cent of transactions completed without a public auction. That has kept price growth modest, 3.2 per cent annually, but yields high.

Investors targeting Throsby should note that the suburb has limited stock: only about 115 houses are currently listed for rent across all platforms, and just 18 are for sale. While that scarcity has pushed yields up, it also means an investor who does land a property can expect minimal vacancy periods, agents say.

For buyers watching the broader market, the lesson is that the highest yields in Canberra are no longer in the inner south or north. They are on the city’s edge, where land is cheaper but demand hasn’t yet softened.