Every Brisbane state high catchment, ranked by ICSEA and median house price

Two numbers do most of the work in deciding where a Brisbane family with school-age kids ends up living. The school's ICSEA score (a socio-educational community profile) and the median price of a house in the catchment.

ACARA publishes ICSEA on MySchool. Real estate portals publish suburb medians. Neither publishes the cross of the two against the actual catchment polygon a student would be enrolling into. We built that cross. The table below is the result.

The table

How to read it

ICSEA 1000 is the national average. ICSEA 1100 sits at roughly the 75th percentile nationally. ICSEA 1150 sits near the 95th. The scale is community-level. It reflects parental education and household income, not teaching quality or NAPLAN outcomes.

We exclude apartments because PXR's automated valuation model has known higher variance on unit stock and the comparison gets noisy when catchments mix apartment-heavy and house-heavy stock. The Brisbane SHS sample is smaller (88 houses) because the catchment is apartment-dominated. The number we report is for the houses that did sell.

Premium tier

Five catchments cluster between $1.90M and $2.30M median. Fortitude Valley State Secondary College tops the table at $2.30M, followed by Brisbane SHS ($2.09M), Aviation High ($2.01M), Kelvin Grove State College ($1.90M) and Indooroopilly SHS ($1.90M). Each catchment combines above-average ICSEA with a strong location premium that drives prices independently of the school. Inner-city walk-to-CBD for Brisbane SHS, Kelvin Grove and Fortitude Valley SSC. Hamilton waterfront for Aviation High. UQ proximity for Indooroopilly. The cliff at these boundaries is real, but it mixes location and catchment effects.

The Kenmore anomaly

Mansfield and Kenmore sit six ICSEA points apart but $48K apart on median sold price. That is the cleanest premium-vs-value pairing on the table. Same socio-educational tier, materially different price.

Below the baseline of the premium tier

MacGregor (ICSEA 1037, median $1.37M) and Ferny Grove (1069, $1.33M) are above-baseline schools at meaningfully lower prices. The ICSEA gap to Mansfield is real, but the budget unlock is real too. For a family choosing between $25K to $40K per year of private school fees and buying inside a state catchment, these are the catchments where the trade-off is most defensible at sub-$1.4M budgets.

The Brisbane South hidden gem

Brisbane South State Secondary College sits at ICSEA 1137, statistically indistinguishable from Indooroopilly SHS (1138) and within 8 points of Brisbane State High (1145). Median sold price in the catchment is $1.46M against Indooroopilly's $1.90M and Brisbane SHS's $2.09M. Sample size is 105 house sales over 12 months, smaller than the inner-city counterparts because the catchment includes a high share of apartment-dominant stock. Worth a closer look for families willing to consider south Brisbane fringe suburbs.

The Cavendish Road puzzle

Holland Park and Carina Heights look like value-catchment territory until the numbers are run. Cavendish Road sits at a higher median price than Mansfield ($1.66M vs $1.56M) while its ICSEA is lower (1103 vs 1116). The price premium reflects inner-east proximity, not catchment quality. Buyers paying Cavendish Road prices are paying for the geography.

Methodology

• Catchment polygons sourced from Queensland Department of Education, 2024 release.
• ICSEA scores from ACARA, verified against MySchool, May 2026 snapshot.
• Scope: every state high school catchment whose school point is physically located inside the Brisbane City Council LGA. 38 catchments total.
• Median sold prices computed from recent residential sale records, 12-month window, houses only, $200K to $10M filter to remove obviously erroneous rows.
• Spatial join via PostGIS ST_Contains matching every G-NAF house point against the catchment MultiPolygon geometry.
• Apartments and units excluded because AVM v3 variance on unit stock makes the cross-catchment comparison noisy.

A natural next question is whether the catchment effect is real at the property level, or just an artefact of suburb pricing. We will publish a follow-up on the boundary cliff at Mansfield. The catchment effect is real and concentrated within a few hundred metres of the line, so confirm which catchment an address actually sits in on the Queensland school catchment finder.

Worked examples in specific suburbs

For an address-level walk-through of how this table's catchments interact with price, crime and flood risk in a specific suburb, see our suburb deep dives:

• Boondall — Aspley + Sandgate District catchment split, $1M-plus house median, flood pockets along Cabbage Tree Creek.
• Goodna — Bellbird Park + Collingwood Park catchments (both below national average), faster price growth than middle-ring BCC over the same window.
• Beenleigh — Beenleigh + Windaroo Valley catchment trade-off, Windaroo Valley under Enrolment Management Plan with strict residency proof.
• Ripley — greenfield Ripley Valley with new state primary and high schools still settling their ICSEA scores.

For a worked example, see how buyers get priced out of the Mansfield catchment. For the wider Brisbane picture, see which streets carry the worst flood risk and the suburbs where recorded crime is falling, or browse all our Queensland suburb research.