The proportion of Canberrans aged 18 to 65 receiving welfare payments has fallen steadily since 1996, from nearly one in five people to just more than one in 10, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Household Income and Income Distribution survey.

Australian National University public policy researcher Peter Whiteford said across Australia the level of people receiving welfare had risen following the global financial crisis, but still remained well below 1996 levels.

The ACT had bucked that trend, with rates of welfare recipiency continuing to fall between 2007-08 and 2008-09.

"[The ACT] has very high employment rates, it's got younger age structure than the rest of the population and it has the least unequal distribution of income of any area in Australia, there's a lot of people doing rather similar things," he said.

Head of the ACT Council of Social Services Susan Helyar said the government's response to the financial crisis had included a large investment in stimulus funds managed by the public sector, which meant Canberra did not lose as many jobs as other states and territories.

Fewer Canberrans worked in the finance sector, which was hard hit during the financial crisis, she said.

Professor Whiteford said rates of welfare recipiency throughout Australia had dropped significantly since the mid-1990s, when nearly one in three people of working age were getting government payments, to 25 per cent in the year 2009-2010.

He said a falling unemployment rate and the scrapping of some welfare payments, including special benefits for the spouses of people on disability allowances or the aged pension, had contributed to fewer people being on welfare.

Middle-aged women were also more likely to have finished school and gone to university than women of the same age 15 years ago, he said, so were more often in the workforce at a later age, and scrapping the aged pension for women aged between 60 and 64 had also contributed to the trend away from welfare receipt.

But Ms Helyar said low rates of unemployment, not the changes to the welfare system, were behind the drop in the proportion of people receiving welfare.

She said when a range of payments were scrapped in the 1990s many people had simply been moved onto the unemployment benefit Newstart, and were receiving less money as a result.

"The thing we know about Newstart recipients is the longer you are on that inadequate payment, the further and further behind you get in terms of your financial resilience, which actually ends up being a barrier to getting back into work," she said.