The total population of the Commonwealth of Australia was counted as 23,401,892 – an increase of 8.8 per cent or 1,894,175 people over the 2011 census.

The ABS annual report revealed that $24 million in additional expenses accrued due to the outage on the census website.

People who leave Australia but do not go through migration formalities are included, counted as part of an "Off-Shore Statistical Areas Level 1" in Tasmania.

Visitors to Australia are included, regardless of how long they are staying for, however those who have been in the country less than a year answer fewer questions on the census.

[7] In the period leading up to census date the Australian Government decided that the retention period for names and addresses would be increased to up to four years, from 18 months in the 2006 and 2011 censuses, leading to concerns about privacy and data security.

[10] Reflecting this new preference, the tagline of the ad campaign for the census was the rhyming slogan "Get online on August 9".

Letters were sent to each dwelling with unique code numbers that people would need to either login to the census website, or order a paper form if they preferred.

[16][17][18] The Australian Signals Directorate assisted the ABS to bring the infrastructure back online more than 24 hours after the closure.

[22] On the same day Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated his unhappiness over the event, which had "been a failure of the ABS", with his expectation that "heads will roll" once a review was complete.

[26][27] It released its findings on 24 November and found that no individual party was responsible but it was shared between the government, IBM, and the sub-contractors.

[28] Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has confirmed that IBM made a "very substantial financial settlement" with the Commonwealth as compensation for the failure of the 2016 online Census.

Once collection was complete, the ABS issued an announcement which confirmed that in spite of the initial online problems, there was a preliminary response rate of more than 96%.

Of the sixty questions, the following two questions were optional:[33] The population counts for Australian states and territories were that New South Wales remains the most populous state, with 7,480,228 people counted, ahead of Victoria (5,926,624) and Queensland (4,703,193).

[45] The highest reported ancestries in Australia and for the external territory of Norfolk Island as a percentage of population.

The number of homeless people in Australia jumped by more than 14,000 – or 14 per cent – in the five years to 2016, according to census data.