Rural and remote areas have a higher burden of disease, leading to inequalities in health between regional and urban areas. This article compares trends in health status and social determinants of health (SDH) in capital cities and the remaining areas of (rest of) states and territories in Australia, and examines the distribution of health and social determinants between metropolitan, inner regional, outer regional, rural and remote areas. Increasing inequality in health and SDH in outer regional, rural and remote areas underscores the ways in which health inequalities strongly correlate with inequalities in SDH. Variation in health and SDH within non-metropolitan areas suggests it may not be appropriate to clump regions and towns together when conducting analysis in Australia. Policies to improve rural and remote health need to enhance existing provisions of social and health infrastructure, with context-specific measures to reduce these health inequalities.