Find a roommate in Adelaide and/or read everything about roommates in Adelaide.

Who's your best roommate in Adelaide?

Who'll pay more rent?

What's affordable in SPRING 2025?

• (?-see footnote)  =  non-traditional average ¹
• 1260 (315 per week)  =  traditional 2BR ÷ 2 ²
• 2080 (520 per week)  =  average 1BR, rented solo ³
• the rest of Australia
• Some errands can be accomplished on foot. ⁴
• the nightlife
• the local wine, the Adelaide Parklands
• hipsters that moan on house prices, basically Saudi Arabia, Afghan, gayest college, the parade, housewives with Porsches, old money, escape pod, rich wogs, old people sitting, fancy shopping, west end grungy, soccer moms ⁵

roomiematch.com's Adelaide roommate rundown:

Adelaide is the smallest and still cheapest capital city of the state of South Australia.

The relative lack of taller buildings makes Adelaide seem less urban than the other four capital cities . . . but it still is a city of about 1.5 million residents.

Over 75% of residents of all of South Australia are Adelaideans, making South Australians very centralized.

Which is particularly nice when you've got such a lovely downtown grid. Adelaide's Central Business District (CBD) is laid out in a easily navigated grid with wider boulevards and five larger public squares, featuring Gothic architecture and beautifully preserved churches, many on cobblestone streets.

There's the Adelaide Arcade - their marketplace built in the nineteenth century. The Central Market has the city's best fresh produce all under one Victorian roof.

And many CBD streets are lined with pleasingly purple Jacarandas.

Then the CBD itself is entirely surrounded by a ring of parks, the Adelaide Parklands. So everyone downtown has pretty easy access to green space, including sports fields, jogging trails, and golf courses.

The River Torrens runs through most of the city, all the way down to the Indian Ocean. You and your roommates could walk or jog along the riverbank.

With the tidy squares on the delightfully wide grid and parks everywhere there's just a general feeling of cleanliness?

Maybe it's just so well laid out, it encourages everyone to be continue to be tidy on its structurally-pleasing behalf.

And then all of that is surrounded by suburban sprawl.

Which you may or may not want to navigate via Adelaide Metro, because while it features buses, trains, and trams, including a lot of free trips around the CBD . . . public transport to the suburbs isn't as extensive.

To and from the city center usually works, but anything more complicated and you'll probably want a car.

And Adelaideans with cars usually drive them to the occasional wine tasting. You and your roommates will usually have your pick of many going on nearby, especially if your definition of nearby includes the Adelaide Hills Wine Country.

Their wine country is economically huge for the region, producing some of the best wine in the world.

So definitely an artsy cafe culture, with locally-grown produce served by multicultural chefs from all over the world, to go with all that local wine . . . but less of a party culture nightlife, like Sydney or Melbourne.

In fact, many shopping centers close a little early?

The vibe is if you don't want to go shopping down a lovely walkway or walking down a lovely parkway . . . you should just veg out while enjoying the fine local wine plus what's going on overhead.

Because Adelaide is like living in an aviary.

Many parks feature lorikeet. Multicolored parrots hanging out in larger groups in most nicer gardens, possibly taking over a fountain or two. They tend to be noisy, especially when they get drunk on fermented fruit nectar.

Adelaide's Grey-headed Flying-foxes (fruit bats) are often seen flying around at dawn and dusk, about 20,000 of them. They could be anywhere in Adelaide, except they need to find shade in the heat too.

Don't worry, they're never aggressive. They're suitably laid back. They're Adelaidean.

The rest of the Adelaide roommate lowdown:

• Hot and dry summers, with occasional heatwaves, where it might not rain for a month. Cool winters with moderate rainfall overall, but very unreliable as to mm of rainfall plus timing. Occasional heavy rain with hail, usually in winter. Regular snow is rare but there is a definite winter wind chill.
• Adelaide was originally settled by the Kaurna, a South Australian Aboriginal tribe.
• Public transport is operated by Adelaide Metro, with buses, trains and trams. They offer free buses and trams around the CBD, with other routes usually cheap. Bicycles can go on some trains. You'll probably want to engage with their website or app to plan your trip, including updates in real time.
• Adelaide is home to the University of Adelaide, Flinders University of South Australia, University of South Australia, Torrens University Australia, and the Adelaide College of Divinity. Adelaide also hosts many medical and health research institutions.
• Like the rest of Australia, meat is the most common pie filling, with a tomato sauce (ketchup) option. Adelaideans also enjoy their beef pies in thick pea soup, known as the "pie floater."
• Cake lovers won't want to miss the Lamington, a vanilla spongecake covered in chocolate and coconut, sometimes filled with sweet cream. There are a few local vendors, and we haven't heard of any less than delicious.
• Some beaches have surfboard rentals complete with lessons, but a bit less surf mania than Sydney or Perth.
• Vegemite just might be an acquired taste, especially for non-native Australians. However, since it's often available in Adelaide's cafes in single-serving packets, you could easily determine if it's a taste you'd like to acquire.

After you're settled down, you and your roommates should experience Adelaide's:

• Rundle Mall is a pedestrian-only shopping experience with over 800 stores. There's a silver pigeon sculpture on a walkway that is rumored to have cost $174,000. There are several silver pigs too.
• South Australia Museum: Celebrating the world's oldest continuous living culture, along with megafauna, opalised fossils, and a working bee hive. Free.
• Art Gallery of South Australia: Over 45,000 works of art spanning 2000 years
• National Wine Centre of Australia: Large collection of wine from all over Australia. Discover different profiles with expert sommeliers and/or sample over 100 wines in the wine bar.
• State Library of South Australia: Many exhibits and collections of everything South Australian. Many say the Mortlock Wing looks magical enough to be in movies.
• Botanic Gardens: Huge. Since 1857, featuring glassblown art by Dale Chihuly and the Amazon Waterlily Pavilion
• Belair National Park: Preserved older buildings, walking trails, waterfalls
• Adelaide Chinatown: The mythical lions next to the archway entrance were a gift from China.
• Australian Space Agency: Learn all about the latest Australian space innovations, headquarted in Adelaide. You could also buy an adorable Kanganaut to support Australia's space ambitions.
• Mount Lofty: You and your roommates could climb to the top to get a fantastic view of the CBD from the summit at 710 meters above sea level.
• Womadelaide: Music, art and dance from around the globe. You can also watch cooking demos with "Taste the World" then download the recipes via PDF to help you and your roommates recreate them yourselves at home.
• The Great Southern Slam (TGSS): The largest flat track roller derby tournament in the world. Since 2010, now featuring almost 50 teams.

Here's the City of Adelaide's page for residents, including everything from renting to parking to mulching.

Notes

1.   The following two paragraphs are what this note says for cities in the United States and Canada, but we can't provide this number for cities in Australia yet because we've only recently added them. We will provide this number when we have more data.

(Not Applicable Yet: The non-traditional roommate rent average for this city we've experienced over the last 3 years. We can't predict future rental availability, because we're neither in control of any rental market nor psychic, sorry!

But in most cities most of the time, the recent and relatively recent past are the best predictors.)

2.   This idea came from smartasset.com's ranking of what a roommate saves you in 50 cities. They ranked where roommates will save you the most money, based on the average cost of a 1BR as opposed to a 2BR ÷ 2. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive the city, the more you can save, but the savings are significant in all larger metros. So we got the data for the rest of our cities from realestate.com.au.

This is really the minimum you could save, as you could live with more than one roommate, split more services, share food or other supplies, etc. More sharing tends to lead to more savings too, as per our roommate roadmap.

As per the rest of the description at the top of this page, we're calling this "traditional" roommate rent.

3.   From realestate.com.au.

4.   Directly quoted from Walk Score's Cities and Neighborhoods Ranking. They've ranked "more than 2,800 cities and over 10,000 neighborhoods so you can find a walkable home or apartment."

5.   From hoodmaps.com: a collaborative map where residents use tags describing social situations you're likely to find. Other users can thumb up or down, so the largest tags have been thumbed up the most.