Australian TV ratings explained: OzTAM, VOZ and where to find the daily numbers

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Australian TV ratings tell the networks how many people watched a program, and they decide which shows are renewed, moved or cancelled. They come from OzTAM, the industry body that measures television viewing in Australia. This guide explains how the numbers are produced, what the jargon in a ratings report means and where to find each day's results. We do not republish OzTAM's figures here, so nothing on this page goes out of date overnight.

An earlier version of this page showed a one-night table of results from October 2023. We removed it because a single old night is not "last night's ratings", and the places listed below publish the current numbers every day.

Where to find the TV ratings each day

• OzTAM and VOZ (the official source). OzTAM publishes a fixed set of daily reports on the VOZ website at virtualoz.com.au: the Total TV Overnight Top 30 Programs (national results for the previous day), the Total TV Consolidated 7 Top 30 Programs (the same ranking after seven days of catch-up viewing), and a weekly cumulative reach report. Subscribers get the full data. OzTAM's report pages explain each one.
• TV Tonight. The site posts the daily overnight ratings in its ratings section.
• Mediaweek. The trade site publishes a daily and weekend TV ratings report built from the overnight data.
• The networks. Seven, Nine, 10, ABC and SBS publish their own press releases when a show wins its night, usually quoting the same OzTAM numbers.

To check what is on tonight, rather than what was watched last night, use our TV guide or the guides for each channel:

• Channel 7 TV guide
• Channel 9 TV guide
• Channel 10 TV guide
• ABC TV guide
• SBS TV guide

Our free-to-air TV guide has the weekly overview, and the streaming guide covers where to watch shows that are not on free-to-air.

Sydney TV guideWhat is on today, tonight and this week

How Australian TV ratings are measured

OzTAM's TV ratings service is called TAM (Television Audience Measurement). OzTAM says it measures viewing in more than 8,000 homes across Australia, representing about 20,000 viewers, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Nielsen collects the TAM data on OzTAM's behalf.

• Who is on the panel. Homes are recruited through an Establishment Survey of random mobile phone interviews. OzTAM cites about 60,000 interviews a year on its TAM page and 65,000 or more in the VOZ glossary, and every home in its coverage areas has an equal chance of being called. The survey sets the mix of homes needed to reflect the Australian population.
• How viewing is recorded. Meters in the panel homes use audio matching against a reference library to identify which free-to-air channel is being watched, whether it is live or time-shifted. Streaming TV Meters in about 6,000 panel homes measure streaming on connected devices.
• The ratings day. OzTAM's Research Day runs from 2am to 1:59am the next morning, so late-night viewing counts towards the day before.

What VOZ is and why it replaced the old numbers

VOZ (short for Virtual Australia) is OzTAM's "Total TV" currency. It brings broadcast TV viewing from the TAM panels together with broadcaster streaming (BVOD) in one national database with people counted once across screens. OzTAM says VOZ draws on more than 20,000 panel viewers and more than 16 million streaming devices a month, and models a synthesised population of about 28 million people.

What counts in VOZ matters when you read a headline:

• Broadcast TV on TV sets, including multichannels, watched live or played back up to 28 days later: ABC, Seven, Nine, 10 and SBS.
• BVOD on any connected device: ABC iview, 7plus, 9Now, 10 and SBS On Demand, including their FAST channels.
• Not included: paid streaming (SVOD) such as Netflix, Stan, Disney+, Prime Video, Paramount+, Apple TV+ and BINGE.
• Foxtel is no longer included. Foxtel's broadcast channels and its streaming services (Foxtel Now, Foxtel Go and Kayo Sports) stopped being included in VOZ Total TV from 15 December 2024, and OzTAM says they are no longer reported in TAM or VPM from 29 December 2024. So you will not find subscription TV ratings in the free reports.

How to read a ratings report

Term	What it means
Overnight	The first-day result. It is the fastest figure and the least complete, because it does not yet include later playback or the schedule corrections the networks send in the next day. When the press talks about "the overnights", this is what they mean.
Consolidated 7	The audience once viewing of the same program is added in for the seven days after it aired. The consolidated figure is higher than the overnight one for shows people record or catch up on.
Consolidated 28	The same idea over four weeks. It appeared in OzTAM's older ratings reports, and the free daily VOZ reports we checked list Overnight and Consolidated 7 only.
Audience	The average number of people watching in any one minute of the program.
Reach	The number of different people who watched at least some of it. OzTAM's minimum is 60 seconds of continuous viewing on broadcast TV and 15 seconds on BVOD.
Total TV	Broadcast TV on TV sets plus BVOD on any screen, counted once per person.
BVOD	Broadcaster video on demand: a network's own streaming service, such as 9Now or 7plus.
Metro and regional	Ratings are reported for the capital cities (OzTAM) and regional markets (Regional TAM). VOZ also covers a "Rest of Australia" group of smaller markets and gives one national picture.

Audience is a different number from reach, so a show can have a smaller audience than another and still reach more people over the night. Two sites quoting different numbers for the same show are usually using different measures (metro against national, overnight against consolidated, or audience against reach).

Why do ratings matter for what you watch?

If your favourite show moved to a new time slot, a different night or disappeared, ratings are usually the reason. Networks use audience measurement data to decide where a program fits in the schedule, whether a returning series is worth keeping and what to put next to it. A show that does well on catch-up can be renewed even if its overnight number looks weak, which is why consolidated figures and BVOD viewing are now reported alongside the overnights.

For what to watch on streaming rather than free-to-air, see our streaming guide and the how the ratings process works explainer.