Essential workers are being priced out of the region's rental market, a new report has found.
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The 'Priced Out' report, released by National housing campaign Everybody's Home, compared data on rents against the award wages for 15 essential worker categories.
In Western Victoria, hospitality workers and meat packers spent the highest percentage of their income at 48 per cent, followed by childcare workers at 47 per cent.
Aged care workers, cleaners, and dispatchers followed as essential occupations spending the most of their income on housing, at 46 per cent.
Western Victorian nurses spent 42 per cent of their income on rent.
Everybody's Home spokesperson Maiy Azize told Australian Community Media there was no region in Victoria that offered average affordable rents for any of the occupations profiled.
"There really isn't a reprieve from rental stress," she said.
"Rents are going up every single year. Rents are forecast to go up by another 10 per cent this year and therefore costs to keep going up well into 2025.
"When workers are already spending half of their incomes, and finding themselves in severe rental stress on today's rent, we know that's only going to get worse."
The report showed the rising cost of rent was likely to land essential workers in single households in serious financial stress, while those in coupled homes were 'probably' financially dependent on their partner.
It also found since March 2020, essential workers lost an average 37 days of income to rent increases each year.
Uniting Vic.Tas homelessness senior manager Adam Liversage said the hike in rental prices has led to more people being "squeezed out" of the rental market or forced into homelessness.
"In some cases rents have gone up by around 20 per cent," he said.
"As more properties become unaffordable and out of reach we've been seeing more working families reach out for help.
"Having a stable income no longer guarantees a person's ability to afford to live.
"Anyone on a part time or casual income or for a single parent household, rental affordability is almost non-existent."
Ms Azize said the trend of regional employers offering housing with jobs showed the "huge shortfall" of social and affordable homes.
"What we're seeing is that problem is being outsourced to employers if they want to fill these jobs," she said.
"We're also seeing huge workforce shortages in some of these professions, aged care, childcare [and] nurses, there's some workforce shortages there depending on the sector that they work in.
"This is a real problem and it's not going to get better if these workers can't afford to live in the communities where they work."
Everybody's Home has called for the federal government to build 25,000 new social homes each year to address rental stress - a commitment, Ms Azize said, which would take two decades to make up the shortfall of social housing in the regions.
