The transition to net zero emissions is driving increased demand for critical minerals, including rare earth elements (REE). Rare earth elements and the technologies they enable, such as permanent magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines, are important across a range of sectors including defence, space, transport, computing and telecommunications. Clay-hosted REE represent a significant source of REE globally, having received significant attention due to the potentially distinct processing advantages. Given their global strategic importance, Geoscience australia is undertaking a national-scale mineral potential assessment for clay-hosted REE mineral systems to evaluate their potential in australia. This work is part of the 'accelerating Development of australia's Rare Earth Resources (aDaRER)' project under the australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub. Rather than aiming to identify individual deposits, the focus of the mineral potential assessment is to delineate prospective regions or districts that possess favourable geological criteria for the development and preservation of a clay-hosted REE mineral system. This study demonstrates how national-scale pre-competitive geoscience data sets can be integrated using a hybrid knowledge- and data-driven methodology that combines a robust statistical analysis with mineral systems expertise to predictively map areas with a higher geological potential for the presence of clay-hosted REE mineral systems. Statistical evaluation of the relationship between different mappable criteria that represent spatial proxies for mineral system processes has been undertaken to test previously published hypotheses on the formation of clay-hosted REE mineral systems. The mineral potential assessment predicts the location of known clay-hosted REE deposits and identifies additional areas of high prospectivity in regions with no previously identified deposits in australia while effectively reducing the exploration search space.