How many states and territories does Australia have?

Australia has 6 states — New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania — plus 2 mainland territories, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory.

What is the abbreviation for New South Wales?

New South Wales is abbreviated NSW. In full ISO 3166-2 form it is AU-NSW. Its capital is Sydney, Australia's most populous city.

Which is the largest state by area?

Western Australia (WA) is by far the largest, covering roughly 2.5 million square kilometres — about a third of the continent. Its capital is Perth.

What is Australia's capital?

The national capital is Canberra, located within the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). It is neither Sydney nor Melbourne, a common misconception.

Are the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory states?

No, they are territories. They have self-government but derive their powers from the federal Parliament rather than from the constitution as the six states do.

What is the Australian State & Territory Reference?

Searchable reference of Australia's 6 states and 2 mainland territories with standard ISO 3166-2 abbreviations, capital cities, and approximate land area in square kilometres. Look up by code, name, or capital. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Australian State & Territory Reference

Name: Australian State & Territory Reference
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Australia’s 8 jurisdictions at a glance

Australia is a federation of 6 states and 2 self-governing mainland territories. This reference lists all 8 with the standard abbreviation (also the ISO 3166-2 suffix, as in AU-NSW), the capital city, and the approximate land area. It is handy for address forms, dropdowns, data validation, or trivia.

Quick reference

Code	Full name	Type	Capital
NSW	New South Wales	State	Sydney
VIC	Victoria	State	Melbourne
QLD	Queensland	State	Brisbane
WA	Western Australia	State	Perth
SA	South Australia	State	Adelaide
TAS	Tasmania	State	Hobart
ACT	Australian Capital Territory	Territory	Canberra
NT	Northern Territory	Territory	Darwin

How it works

The dataset is a curated offline table. Typing in the search box filters every entry whose abbreviation, name, or capital matches your text — so NSW finds New South Wales, Perth finds Western Australia by its capital, and terr surfaces the two territories. Land areas are rounded figures from standard public references, in square kilometres.

States vs territories — what the difference means

All six states draw their powers from the Australian Constitution, which grants them broad legislative authority. The two territories — the ACT and the NT — are self-governing under federal legislation but lack that constitutional shield: Parliament can in principle override their laws, and they do not have the same representation in the Senate (each gets two senators rather than twelve). For address validation and postal forms this distinction rarely matters, but it surfaces in contexts like gaming licences, firearms legislation, and health regulations, where territory laws can be overridden by Canberra.

Size and population quirks

Western Australia (WA) covers roughly 2.5 million km² — about a third of the entire continent — but holds only around 11% of the national population, concentrated in Perth. By contrast, Victoria (VIC) is the smallest mainland state by area yet the second most populous, housing around a quarter of all Australians in a dense south-eastern corridor.

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is tiny — just over 2,000 km² — and exists precisely to house the federal capital, Canberra. It was carved from New South Wales in 1911 as a deliberate compromise: neither Sydney nor Melbourne could claim the national capital, so a neutral inland site was created. This is the origin of the persistent but wrong belief that Sydney is Australia’s capital.

Tasmania (TAS) is the only island state, separated from Victoria by Bass Strait. Its code in full ISO form is AU-TAS; the Australia Post abbreviation is the same three-letter code without the country prefix.

Using the codes in practice

When building address forms, the two-letter codes (NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA, TAS, ACT, NT) are the ones Australia Post uses and the ones carriers expect on parcels. The ISO 3166-2 form prefixes AU-: for example AU-NSW for New South Wales. Use the prefix form in internationalised databases or when combining with addresses from multiple countries; use the bare two-letter code for domestic Australian forms.