Methodology

How the directory is built and how industry is labelled.

From 9 million ABNs to 2.76 million businesses

The Australian Business Register lists every entity with an ABN, but most of them aren't what a person means by “a business.” The default directory narrows the register to active, trading entities:

  • Active ABNsevery business with an active ABN on the register9,037,502
  • − Sole traders / individualsa person's name can't be searched or classified as a business4,285,326
  • Enrichment-eligible entitiescompanies, trusts, partnerships and other non-individual entities4,752,176
  • − Non-tradingholding companies, family trusts and SMSFs that hold assets rather than trade1,820,926
  • − Strata / body corporateowners' corporations that operate a strata scheme's common property168,862
  • Trading businessesthe directory's default view2,762,388

Nothing is deleted. Sole traders, non-trading entities and strata bodies stay searchable by ABN or name and are one click away under the Type filter. The 2.76 million is simply the sensible default for browsing genuine businesses.

How industry is labelled

Industry (ANZSIC division and code) is labelled from the registered business name. The register itself does not publish an industry for most ABNs. Three layers run in order, cheapest first:

  • Keywords: a name containing a diagnostic trade term (“plumbing”, “conveyancing”, “cafe”) maps to its ANZSIC class. Measured 74.4% accurate at division level against website-verified labels.
  • Name classifier: a model trained on the registered names of already-labelled businesses, catching morphology keywords miss.
  • Language model: for names that carry a genuine but non-obvious signal.

Of the 2.76 million trading businesses, about 39% (1.07 million)carry a labelled industry; the rest trade under names that don't reliably signal what they do. Every label is a model output, not official ABR or ABS classification, and carries a confidence level (High / Medium / Low). Strata is the one exception: it comes from the register itself, so it's a fact rather than a label.

Data source & freshness

Built from the Australian Business Register (© Commonwealth of Australia, CC-BY 3.0 AU), refreshed weekly. Figures on this page were measured on 4 August 2026 and shift slightly with each refresh.

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