While foreign immigrants continue to descend on Sydney, making it their gap-year playground, lifestyle retreat or refuge from danger, Australian residents would prefer to be elsewhere.

Behind the city’s well-publicised population growth is a little-known fact: Sydney loses more people to the rest of Australia than it gains, and has done so for more than four decades.

In fact, Census data collated exclusively for the Herald shows Sydney has lost people to every Australian capital city and state over the past 45 years on a net basis.

All up Sydney has lost net 716,832 people to the rest of Australia since 1971.