NCIRS releases annual report on immunisation coverage

The Annual Immunisation Coverage Report 2024 provides comprehensive data on vaccination coverage across age groups and geographical areas in Australia, identifying broad trends by comparing vaccine coverage in 2024 with that of previous years.

The publication of the full report follows the release of an interim summary of 2024 vaccination data in May 2025.
 

An uneven playing field? Adolescent HPV vaccination

In 2024, the gap in vaccination coverage between adolescent girls and boys for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was more than 3%, with 81.1% of girls and 77.9% of boys vaccinated against the sexually transmissible infection by their fifteenth birthday.

This is well below the target of 90% HPV vaccination coverage for both girls and boys set out in the Australian Government’s National Strategy for the Elimination of Cervical Cancer.

It also represents a decline from 2020, with coverage dropping by 5.5 percentage points for girls and 7.0 points for boys.

Among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adolescents, HPV vaccination coverage also fell from that recorded in 2020 – by 11.1 percentage (among girls) and 13.8 percentage points (among boys).

Despite the common belief that HPV only affects women – the virus causes almost all cervical cancers – it also poses significant health risks to men.

Equity is also a concern – the report’s data show that 15-year-olds living in socio-economically disadvantaged and remote areas are 5–10 percentage points less likely to have received at least one dose of HPV vaccine compared to those living in socioeconomically advantaged areas and major cities.
 

Declining vaccination coverage in childhood

The percentage of fully vaccinated children in Australia decreased between 2023 and 2024 at all key milestones:

• 12 months of age (from 92.8% to 91.6%)
• 24 months of age (from 90.8% to 89.4%)
• 60 months of age (from 93.3% to 92.7%).

This continues a downward trend observed between the 2020 and 2023 data.

Vaccination coverage also fell among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at key milestones – the one exception being coverage for meningococcal B vaccine, with coverage in 2024 higher than the previous year.
 

Other takeaways

The picture for adult coverage of vaccines is more mixed than that of adolescents and children, but consistently suboptimal across all vaccines.

However, reported coverage of the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults aged over 70 years in 2024 was 47.8% – 8.1 percentage points higher than in 2023.

Read the full report [PDF]