Investing · 7 min read
QLD suburbs with the strongest gross rental yields in 2026
Five Queensland suburbs across Logan, Ipswich, Townsville, the Gold Coast and Cairns where the rent-to-price ratio is doing real work for landlords in 2026.
Five Queensland suburbs are clearing 6.5% gross rental yield in 2026, and none of them sit in the brochure-friendly Brisbane inner ring. The yield leaders all share the same recipe: a price anchor under $550,000, a weekly rent above $470, and a tenant pool that wants three bedrooms with a yard rather than a balcony.
Gross yield is a blunt tool. It ignores body corp, rates, management fees, and the maintenance bill on a 1970s weatherboard. But it is the single number that tells you whether the rent cheque covers the mortgage, and in a 6% cash-rate environment that question matters more than it has in fifteen years.
What gross yield actually means
Gross rental yield is annual rent divided by purchase price, expressed as a percentage. The arithmetic:
gross yield % = (weekly rent x 52) / purchase price x 100
A $500,000 purchase that rents for $600 a week works out to $31,200 a year, divided by $500,000, which is 6.24%. The same $600 weekly rent on an $800,000 house drops the yield to 3.9% — the rent is identical, the price tag is the lever.
For a deeper walk through the formula and why net yield diverges, the rental-yield primer breaks down the gross-versus-net gap on a worked Brisbane investment. The rental yield calculator does the maths for any combination you punch in.
The five QLD suburbs leading the yield table
Illustrative figures, regenerated quarterly. Numbers below are representative of the Q1 2026 snapshot for these regions and will shift as new sales settle and lease renewals reprice.
| Suburb | LGA | Median price | Median rent | Gross yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logan Central | Logan | $415,000 | $540/wk | 6.77% |
| Goodna | Ipswich | $380,000 | $525/wk | 7.18% |
| Mount Louisa | Townsville | $360,000 | $510/wk | 7.37% |
| Coombabah | Gold Coast | $540,000 | $720/wk | 6.93% |
| Manunda | Cairns | $310,000 | $470/wk | 7.88% |
A worked example you can replicate
Take Goodna. A $380,000 purchase that rents at $525 a week produces $27,300 of gross rent across a full year. Divide by the purchase price and you get 0.0718, or 7.18%. At a 6% interest- only loan with a 20% deposit, the loan size is $304,000 and the annual interest is roughly $18,240. The rent covers the interest with $9,000 of headroom before any costs touch the picture.
Repeat the exercise on Coombabah. A $540,000 purchase at $720 rent gives $37,440 annual rent, 6.93% gross. The 80% loan is $432,000 and the annual interest at 6% is $25,920. Again the rent covers the interest, with about $11,500 of headroom for rates, insurance, management, and the surprise hot-water-system replacement.
These suburbs are not magic. They are houses on regular streets in regional and outer-metro Queensland where rent has climbed faster than capital values over the last three years. The yield gap exists because tenant demand has compressed vacancy without a matching surge in buyer interest.
What the yield number does not tell you
- Capital growth. A high-yield suburb is not a high-growth suburb. Logan Central, Goodna, and Manunda have all had soft capital-growth decades; the yield is partly a symptom of the price ceiling staying flat while rents re-rated post-2022.
- Tenant turnover. Two-week vacancies are devastating to yield. A $525-a-week rental that sits empty for a fortnight loses $1,050 from the year — about a third of a percentage point of yield gone.
- Body corporate. Three of the five suburbs above are house markets, not unit markets. Body corp is the quiet killer of unit-investment net yield in Queensland; a $5,000 annual levy on a $400,000 unit is a 1.25% drag on gross yield before you start paying rates.
- Insurance.Cairns and parts of Townsville carry cyclone-zone premiums that can run two or three times the south-east Queensland equivalent. Manunda's 7.88% gross can compress sharply once you price the cover honestly.
- Small-sample noise. Suburb medians on small sales volumes wobble quarter to quarter. A 7.4% reading in one quarter can settle at 6.8% three quarters later as the comparable-sales window catches up. Treat any single quarter as a signal, not a contract.
How to read these numbers on the platform
Every Burbfinder suburb page surfaces the same median-price and median-rent inputs, sourced from state property-transfer data for sales and from RTA bond-lodgement data for rents. The platform's yield figure is computed with the same formula used in this article: weekly rent times 52, divided by median sale price.
Two notes when you compare suburbs:
- The price and rent inputs are typically one quarter apart, and our pipeline picks the latest available release for each. For a fast-moving market this introduces a small lag; for a flat market it changes nothing.
- Houses and units are blended into a single median unless the suburb has a clean separation. In suburbs with a mix (Coombabah is an example) the yield reading sits between the house-only and unit-only figures, neither of which is published alone in the v1 yield ranking.
The next step
Use the rental yield calculator on a real listing rather than the suburb median. The suburb number is a screening tool; the listing number is the one you're actually buying. Drop in the asking price, the rental appraisal from your property manager, and the calculator returns gross plus a rough net once you add your expense estimates.
If a suburb passes the yield screen, the next questions are whether vacancy is durable, whether rates and insurance are in the band you assumed, and whether the area has the kind of tenant pool that holds a lease for two years rather than six months. None of those answers live on a yield table. They live in the rental ledger, the council agenda, and the agent's honest read of the street.
Yield is the entry filter. The rest is due diligence.