Australia vaccine queue
A healthy 72-year-old outside any priority occupation lands in Phase 1b of Australia's 2021 COVID-19 rollout, at a rough place of 3,800,000 in the queue. Pick an age, an occupation category and a health status to see the phase and how many people were ahead. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Age
- 72
- Occupation
- Other
- Health condition
- None
- Phase
- 1b
- Band
- age_70_79
- Band label
- Adults aged 70–79 years
- Queue position
- 3,800,000
This Australian COVID-19 vaccine queue estimator maps age, occupation category, and health conditions onto the 2021 National COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Strategy used by the Australian Government. It returns the priority phase (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, or 3) and a rough one-based queue position under published cohort sizes for each phase. Quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare staff, and aged-care or disability-care residents and staff land in Phase 1a. Adults aged 70 and over, other healthcare workers, people with qualifying underlying conditions, and specified critical workers land in Phase 1b. Adults aged 50 to 69 and remaining critical workers land in Phase 2a. Other adults aged 16 to 49 land in Phase 2b. People under 16 land in Phase 3.
How the 2021 Australian vaccine phases become a queue position
Australia opened COVID-19 vaccination in February 2021 under a five-step National COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Strategy agreed with ATAGI. Phase 1a covered quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare workers in COVID-facing roles, and aged-care and disability-care staff and residents — about 1.4 million people. Phase 1b covered adults aged 70 and over, other healthcare workers, younger adults with a qualifying underlying medical condition or disability, and named critical workers in defence, police, fire, emergency services, and meat processing — about 6.1 million people.
Phase 2a covered adults aged 50 to 69 and remaining critical and high-risk workers — about 6.6 million people. Phase 2b covered the remaining adult population aged 16 to 49 — about 6.7 million people. Phase 3 covered people under 16 — about 4.9 million people.
This estimator assigns the highest matching phase for the submitted profile, then places the person inside that phase using occupation and health sub-bands that follow the same public order, with older ages earlier inside each band under a uniform-age assumption. Queue position is one plus the people in all earlier phases, plus the people in earlier bands of the current phase, plus the estimated number of older people in the current band.
The result is a reproducible teaching number, not a live appointment system and not a substitute for the booking tools that states and territories actually ran.
Where a vaccine-queue estimator earns its keep, pricing, and limits
Newsrooms and explainer desks reconstructing the 2021 rollout use an Australian vaccine queue calculator so a reader can type an age, pick an occupation, and see Phase 1b versus Phase 2a without scraping archived PDF fact sheets. Civics and public-health classrooms grade the same three-field profile against a deterministic oracle instead of a spreadsheet that silently ranks a 69-year-old with a 70-year-old. Failed validation does not consume balance.
This is an educational reconstruction of published 2021 cohort sizes, not a diagnostic medical device, not an official government waitlist, and not advice about whether any person should have been vaccinated. Eligibility rules later changed for children, boosters, and state booking windows; this calculator freezes the original national phase table so two clients never drift. People making personal health decisions should follow current official advice.
What you can do with it
News explainers of the 2021 rollout
Let a reader enter age, occupation, and health status and show the matching National Rollout Strategy phase plus a rough queue position next to the source cohort sizes.
Classroom civics and public-health grading
Mark three-field vaccine-priority items with a deterministic oracle that rejects a negative age and never invents a phase outside 1a–3.
FAQ
Which occupations map to Phase 1a?
Other healthcare, emergency services, and meat processing map to Phase 1b.
Does an underlying health condition move someone earlier?
Children under 16 stay in Phase 3 under the original adult-first table.
Is this an official waitlist, and what does it cost?
No. It is an educational reconstruction of published 2021 cohort sizes, not medical advice and not a government booking tool. The browser tool is free.
Which phase were Australians aged 50 to 69 in?
Phase 2a, together with the remaining critical and high-risk workers, about 6.6 million people in all. Adults aged 16 to 49 without a priority job came next in Phase 2b, and people under 16 in Phase 3.
How is the rough queue position worked out?
It adds one to everyone in the earlier phases, the people in earlier bands of the same phase and the estimated number of older people in your own band, assuming ages are spread evenly. It is a teaching number, not an appointment.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-australia \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"age":72,"occupation":"other","health_condition":"none"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-australia", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"health_condition": "none"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-australia",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"health_condition": "none"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-australia", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"age":72,"occupation":"other","health_condition":"none"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"age":72,"occupation":"other","health_condition":"none"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-australia", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"health_condition": "none"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "health.vaccine_queue_australia",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
A negative age fails with invalid_input and is not billed.
Input contract, response shape, and error behaviour
Finite-domain values are enums so the form paints a select instead of a free-text trap. A negative age fails with the explicit message that age must not be negative — that is the product promise, and those failures are not billed. Optional keys are omitted rather than set to null. POST a JSON body with three required fields. age is a finite number of completed years from 0 through 120; numeric strings such as "72" are accepted, as is the alias age_years. occupation is one of the closed categories quarantine_border, frontline_healthcare, aged_disability_care, other_healthcare, emergency_defence_police, meat_processing, other_critical, or other; the alias occupation_category is accepted. health_condition is none, underlying, or care_resident; the alias health_conditions is accepted. A missing field, a non-finite age, an occupation or health value outside the enum, or an age above 120 fails with invalid_input naming the field. On success the body echoes age, occupation, and health_condition, reports phase as 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, or 3, and reports phase_label in plain language. band and band_label name the sub-cohort used for ranking. queue_position is the one-based estimate; people_ahead is queue_position minus one. method is always national_rollout_strategy_2021 so clients can pin the rule set. notes restates why that phase was chosen. This endpoint does not collect Indigenous status, postcode, or employer name, so it cannot reproduce every ATAGI footnote; it reproduces the three public levers people actually remember.
Where a vaccine-queue estimator earns its keep, pricing, and limits
Keep requests small, pin queue_position and phase in tests, and you get a reproducible Australian vaccine-queue estimate for homework, graphics, and edge workers without standing up a booking stack of your own.
Integration use cases
Historical timelines and museum interactives
Drive a kiosk or documentary companion from the same parse contract the API bills, so the free widget and the archive backend never disagree.
Technical questions
How is the Australian COVID vaccine queue position estimated?
The calculator assigns the highest matching 2021 National Rollout Strategy phase from age, occupation, and health_condition, then ranks inside that phase with older people first. queue_position is one plus people in earlier phases and earlier bands.
What happens if age is negative?
The task fails with invalid_input and the message that age must not be negative. Invalid input is not billed.