How Do Older Australians Use Technology, and What Does It Mean for Your Research?

Most older Australians are now online, and they are getting more capable quickly. But “over 65” hides two very different groups. Australians aged 65 to 74 sit about ten points below the national average on the 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, while roughly two in three people aged 75 and over are still classed as digitally excluded. At the same time, digital ability among over-75s has risen faster than in any other group since 2023. For marketers, policy teams and NFPs, the practical upshot is simple: don’t assume older people aren’t online, don’t assume they all are, and don’t research them using online methods alone. If you do, your data will look far more confident than your audience is.

Why does the older market matter more every year?

Because it is big, growing and still routinely underestimated. University population projections (CEPAR, based on 2021 Census data) put Australia’s 65-plus population at 4.31 million in 2021, rising to around 6.66 million by 2041, or about one in five Australians.

The baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964) are driving that shift. The oldest boomers turn 80 this year; the youngest reach 65 in 2029. That is nearly two decades of birth years bundled into one marketing label.

If you sell to this audience, deliver services to it, or fund programs for it, you need to know more than its size. You need to know how it actually shops, searches, uses and decides, and where the real differences sit.

How do older Australians actually use technology in 2026?

The short version: access is close to universal for younger retirees, confidence is rising sharply, and a large minority of the oldest Australians are still on the wrong side of the divide. Here is what the most recent public data says:

• 65–74 year olds score 62.9 on the 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index, against a national score of 73.6. That is a real gap, but this group is mostly online.
• Two-thirds of Australians aged 75 and over (66.5%) are digitally excluded, the highest rate of any group the Index tracks.
• Digital ability among over-75s jumped from 23.3 to 41.5 between 2023 and 2025, the biggest gain of any group. Skills and confidence are moving fast, from a low base.
• Affordability bites hardest at the oldest end. People aged 75 and over are the age group most likely to spend more than 10% of household income on internet access.
• The pandemic was a turning point. ACMA found social media use among over-75s more than doubled, from 18% to 41%, between June 2019 and June 2020.
• Using technology isn’t the same as liking it. In ACMA’s 2020 research, 80% of older Australians said they found technology difficult to keep up with.

That last point matters most. Being online and feeling in control online are different things, and the second drives behaviour.

Why is “over 65” the wrong way to segment this audience?

Age is the easiest variable to buy in a sample and one of the least useful on its own. A 67-year-old consultant who manages her super through an app and an 84-year-old who relies on a grandchild to book telehealth appointments share an age band and almost nothing else.

Better questions to segment on include:

• Confidence, not just access: can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong, or does one failed login end the journey?
• Support networks: do they have someone to ask, and does that person end up making the decision?
• Channel preference by task: comfortable streaming TV is not the same as comfortable entering card details.
• Trust and scam anxiety: caution can look like disengagement in the data when it is really a deliberate choice.
• Affordability: a household that rations data behaves differently from one that doesn’t think about it.

What goes wrong when research ignores digital confidence?

The most common mistake is methodological. If you run an online survey through a standard panel, you are surveying the older Australians who are comfortable doing online surveys. The results will tell you your audience is more digital, more confident and more satisfied than it really is.

That flows straight into bad decisions: a “digital-first” service that leaves its heaviest users stranded, a campaign that assumes an app download, or a satisfaction score that only counts the people who could get through the form. Robust survey design for older audiences usually means mixed modes (phone, paper or face-to-face alongside online) and quotas built on confidence as well as age.

The same blind spot shows up in customer experience measurement. Older customers who drop out of a digital process often never appear in the feedback loop at all. Mapping the full journey, including the phone call to a family member and the trip to the branch, is often where the real friction turns up.

None of this means avoiding digital methods. Online research communities can work beautifully with confident older participants. The point is to choose methods deliberately rather than by default.

Ruby Cha Cha’s take: split, mix, watch

Our rule of thumb for researching older Australians comes down to three moves:

1. Split the cohort. Never report “65+” as one number. At minimum, separate 65–74 from 75-plus, then layer in digital confidence.
2. Mix the mode. Make sure your fieldwork method isn’t filtering out the people you’re trying to understand. If the question is about digital behaviour, you especially can’t ask it only online.
3. Watch, don’t just ask. Older people often under-report difficulty, partly from politeness and partly from pride. Observing someone complete a real task, through one-on-one depth interviews or in-home ethnographic research, shows you the workarounds, sticky notes and phone calls a survey will never capture.

Group discussion has its place too. Well-moderated focus groups are useful for exploring attitudes to technology, trust and ageing, as long as the moderator keeps the most confident voice in the room from setting the agenda.

 We have had loads of experience running focus groups and qualitative interviews and observations with these segments, there is an art.

How does better research on older Australians lead to better decisions?

Getting this audience right pays off in very practical ways:

• Products and services that work for the people who use them most, not just the ones who answer surveys.
• Fewer expensive redesigns, because usability and trust issues surface before launch, not after.
• Messaging that respects people. Older Australians notice when they are being patronised, and when they are being ignored.
• Defensible decisions for government and NFP teams, who need to show that digital changes don’t exclude the people they are funded to serve.

Before committing budget, testing concepts with the right older segments is far cheaper than discovering the problem through complaints. And when the brief is genuinely exploratory, qualitative research is usually the fastest way to understand what’s really going on.

Frequently asked questions

How do older Australians use the internet?

Most Australians aged 65 to 74 are online and use the internet for communication, news, banking, shopping and entertainment. Use drops and confidence falls among people aged 75 and over, two-thirds of whom are still classed as digitally excluded. Skills in that group are rising faster than in any other.

What is the best way to research older consumers in Australia?

Use mixed methods and mixed modes. Qualitative research is strong. But also consider combining online approaches with phone, paper or face-to-face fieldwork so less confident people aren’t excluded and split the sample by age band and digital confidence rather than treating “65+” as one group. Observation-based qualitative work is especially useful for uncovering problems people won’t volunteer.

Why does digital inclusion for older Australians matter to marketers?

Because a large share of a growing, high-value audience can’t easily complete digital tasks, even when they want to. If your marketing, service or product assumes digital confidence, you’ll lose those customers without ever seeing why in your data. Understanding digital inclusion helps you design journeys that work for everyone.

Talk to us

Ruby Cha Cha is a boutique research and strategy consultancy based in Surry Hills, and we love the briefs where the easy answer is probably wrong. If you’re designing for, marketing to or making policy for older Australians, our research and strategy consultants can help you work out who you’re really talking to. Get in touch with the team to start the conversation.