Almost six-and-a-half million people living in Australia, or 28% of the population, were born overseas – an increase of 1.7 million over the past decade.

The largest group of foreign born residents are from the UK, the traditional source of most of our migrants; but there been large increase in settlers from New Zealand, China and India.

These are the key findings of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013 population snapshot, released this week.

Across Australia, people born in the United Kingdom remained the largest group of migrants with more than 1.2 million calling Australia home.

They were followed by 608,800 from New Zealand, 427,600 from China and 369,700 from India.

State breakdowns show Western Australia now has 33.4%, or 786,500 people, who were not born in Australia.

They also recorded the largest increase in the proportion of overseas born residents, up from 29.9% in 2006.

Victoria has the second-highest proportion, with 28.7% – or 1,589,800 residents – born overseas, with higher proportions of residents born in India (2.3%), Italy (1.5%), Vietnam (1.4%), Greece (1.1%) and Sri Lanka (0.9%) than any other state or territory.

The Northern Territory had the highest proportion of people born in the Philippines (1.9 per cent).