How to look up an ABN (single and in bulk)

An ABN (Australian Business Number)is the 11-digit identifier every business uses to deal with the government and other businesses. Looking one up tells you whether an entity is real, currently registered, and what it's registered for. There are three ways to do it, depending on what you start with.

1. Look up a business by its ABN

If you already have the 11-digit number, a direct lookup returns the registered entity name, ABN status (active or cancelled), GST registration, state and postcode, and entity type. Paste the number into ABN matching— spaces don't matter, 51 824 006 411 and 51824006411 both work.

The first thing to read is status. An active ABN means the registration is current; a cancelled one means it has ended, which is a useful signal that an entity may no longer be trading under that number.

2. Find a business by name

More often you have a name, not a number. Search the business directoryby name, and narrow by industry, state or postcode to disambiguate common names. Because registered names are messy — legal names, trading names and business names all differ — an exact-text search can miss the entity you want. That's what fuzzy matching is for (next section).

3. Match a messy name to the right ABN

Real-world names arrive abbreviated, misspelled, or with a trading name that doesn't match the legal entity — bobs cafe surry hills should still resolve to BOB'S CAFE PTY LTD. Name matching handles the spelling and trading-name variation and returns the best ABN with a confidence score and the reason it matched, so you can set a threshold and only accept confident hits.

Looking up ABNs in bulk

For a list — a CRM export, a supplier ledger, a prospect sheet — you don't want to check rows one at a time:

• Upload a CSV of ABNs or names for a bulk lookup and export the matched records back out.
• Call the API to resolve names and ABNs programmatically, including asynchronous jobs for large files. See the API docs.

What the fields mean

• Entity name — the legal name on the register; trading and business names are held separately.
• ABN status — active or cancelled, with the date it changed.
• GST — whether the entity is currently registered for GST.
• Industry (ANZSIC) — the ABR doesn't publish an industry, so this is a labelled division and class with a confidence score, not official data.
• Location — the registered state and postcode, not necessarily where the business trades.

Which method should I use?

One number to check: a direct ABN lookup. A name to find: directory search. Messy names, or more than a handful of rows: name matching or the API. For verifying a business rather than just finding it, see how to verify an Australian business.