Roy Morgan’s latest Australian Readership report has Better Homes and Gardens and Women’s Day leading the paid magazine market, as print continues to hold its ground across a fragmented media landscape.
Filling out the top four, The Australian Women’s Weekly and New Idea both have cross-platform audiences of over 1.6 million. The Australian Women’s Weekly has launched its own stand-alone website offering a premium lifestyle experience for users which will supercharge the brand for content commerce.
The most widely read magazine category is food and entertainment magazines with a readership of 6,300,000. That is two million ahead of any other category and reaching over one-in-four Australians.
The second most widely read category is home and garden magazines with a readership of 3,972,000. This category landed just ahead of the third placed general interest magazines on 3,949,000.
There were increases in readership for women’s lifestyle magazines, up 25 per cent to 503,000, sports magazines up 17.4 per cent to 585,000 and computing, gaming and info tech magazines up 10.3 per cent to a readership of 274,000.
Australia’s two most widely read free magazines are Coles Magazine and Fresh Ideas. Coles has a print readership of 4,437,000 ahead of Fresh Ideas (from Woolworths) with a print readership of 4,084,000.
Bunnings Magazine is the third most widely read free magazine with a print readership of 1,741,000 ahead of the NRMA’s Open Road with a readership of 1,215,000.
Other magazines to increase their print readership are Qantas Magazine up 10.6 per cent to 580,000, Gardening Australia up 0.3 per cent to 457,000 and Vogue Australia up 6 per cent to 445,000.
Roy Morgan chief executive officer Michele Levine said “The latest Roy Morgan readership survey shows over 14.4 million Australians (62.1 per cent of Australians aged 14+) now read magazines whether in print or online and print readership is almost half the population at 10.8 million (46.5 per cent of all Australians).
“The print readership results show many magazines have large audiences including seven with print readership of 1 million plus Australians and another five with print readership of at least 500,000 people. At a broader level over 30 magazines have a print readership of at least 250,000 people.
“The most widely read magazines draw large and valuable audiences for advertisers to their print editions with over 1.6 million people now reading Better Homes and Gardens, around 1.2 million that read The Australian Women’s Weekly and well over 1 million reading National Geographic.
“The full cross-platform and print readership results for the year to March 2026 show magazines are reaching well over three-fifths of Australians – 14.4 million (62.1 per cent) either in print or online via the web or app. Magazines remain an excellent medium to reach valuable audiences of all ages that have more discretionary income to spend than the average Australian.”
