In fact, new data from the 2016 Census reveals that the capital is a richly layered city when it comes to how we live, rather than a wealthy enclave littered with pockets of disadvantage.

The data, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday, both confirmed what we knew already, and contained several surprises, especially when broken down into different areas within suburbs.

The city may be largely affluent - or "advantaged" - as the data would have it, but there are wide disparities between rich and poor in suburbs like Griffith, Turner and Red Hill, due to the composition of public housing.

And new suburbs like Crace, Wright and Coombs featured in the top 10 most advantaged suburbs in Canberra, while Deakin and Yarralumla were absent.

The bureau's director of Census dissemination Phillip Wise said the data, known as the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas, showed that "advantage" and "disadvantage" were not only related to wealth.

"What we're trying to do is really summarise the rich and detailed information you can get from the Census that is related to socio-economic disadvantage," he said.

"It's not just wealth or high income, but it's things like educational attainment, it's things like family structures or household composition."

He said the index involved more than 20 different variables on both ends of the spectrum, including house size, educational attainment and the number of people working in skilled or unskilled professions.

"[Other variables include] how many unemployed people are in the area proportionately, how many one-parent families are there proportionately, how many people are paying low amounts of rent, how many people have a bachelor degree or higher, how many people work in a high-skill occupation, or are attending university," he said.

"So it's not just a high income or a large number of bedrooms that drives the advantage scores, which is why your traditional areas like your Red Hill or Mugga Way weren't in the top 10 advantaged areas."

He said the inner-south suburb of Narrabundah -on the lower end of the spectrum - was a good example of diversity, with three distinct areas of relative advantage and disadvantage.

New suburbs that made it into the top 10 most advantaged areas (Wright was number 2) because it was made of newer and larger houses with typically high mortgages, thus nudging more established suburbs like Deakin and Yarralumla down the list.

But Canberrans shouldn't be concerned at where their suburb lies on the list, as many of Canberra's suburbs are relatively advantaged in the context of the rest of Australia.

"It's not judgement that the ABS is placing on the contributions of that, it's a statistical technique that we apply," Mr Wise said.

"It looks at the relationships between all of that Census data and says well, advantaged areas tend to have more people that are attending university, because we know that that's related to dwellings with a high number of bedrooms.

"It's all a relative ranking."