Australian businesses by state and entity type (ABR data, 2026)

Method: what this page counts

Read the method before the numbers. The entity type on each record is a field in the source file, not a classification we applied, and the definitions below decide what lands in each column.

Source. The ABN Bulk Extract published by the Australian Business Register on data.gov.au, snapshot dated 3 September 2026. We parsed the two public XML splits, 20 parts in total, and loaded 4,770,875 rows into a local database. The entity type on every row is the EntityTypeInd code from the extract, and the plain-English label beside it in the legend below is the matching EntityTypeText from the same file. Nothing here is our own taxonomy.

What counts. One row is one Australian Business Number whose status reads ACT, meaning active on 3 September 2026. We dropped every ABN with the entity type IND, individuals and sole traders, so nothing on this page describes the sole trader population. Cancelled ABNs are absent from the file, so every count is a live count rather than a historical total.

The state figure. State comes from the business address recorded against the main entity. 18,075 active records carry no state, 0.4 percent of the file, and we left them out of the state tables. Two different bases therefore run on this page: the national legend table counts all 4,770,875 records, and every state table counts the 4,752,800 records that carry one of the eight states or territories. Each table says which base it uses.

Grouping. The legend table lists individual codes as the extract supplies them. The state tables group those codes into five families, because 71 distinct codes will not fit a readable table. Private company holds PRV and SCR. Public company holds PUB alone. Trust holds every trust code, from the two discretionary types down to the government trusts. Self-managed super fund holds SMF alone. Partnership holds FPT, PTR and LPT. Everything else, including the 167,987 strata-title records and the 172,815 other incorporated entities, sits in Other.

Entity types across Australia, with the code legend

The fifteen largest codes cover 4,733,597 records, 99.2 percent of the file. The remaining 37,278 records spread across 56 further codes, mostly government bodies and specialist funds.

Shares run against the full 4,770,875 records. Companies of both kinds, private and public together, account for 2,184,960 records or 45.8 percent. The register is therefore slightly more than half made up of structures that are not companies at all.

Entity type by state and territory

Four of the five families, across the eight states and territories. This table counts 4,752,800 records, and the Other family plus public companies make up the difference between each row and its state total.

Download the full cross-tab as CSV. The file carries the same nine rows as the table above and adds the public company and Other columns plus a row total, so every state row sums to its full record count. Reuse it with attribution to Ripe Leads and to the Australian Business Register.

New South Wales holds 1,603,325 records in total, Victoria 1,296,968, Queensland 910,150, Western Australia 463,559, South Australia 316,096, the ACT 69,313, Tasmania 66,883 and the Northern Territory 26,506.

Public companies against private companies

29,648 public companies sit on the register nationally. Every state runs the same shape at a different steepness.

South Australia runs the thinnest public company layer of the eight, one for every 100.0 private companies. The ACT runs the thickest at one in 50.8, and it is the only jurisdiction under 55. New South Wales, with 11,669 public companies, holds 39.4 percent of the national public company count on 33.7 percent of the register.

Public companies are the group most B2B target lists are built around, and they are 0.6 percent of the file. Any list that expects to reach listed and unlisted public companies at scale in Australia is working from a base of under 30,000 entities nationally, before any filter for sector, size or contactability.

Trusts and super funds against public companies

Three ratios against the 29,648 public companies, all measured on the full national file:

Trusts of every code total 1,081,220, which is 36.5 trusts for every public company. The two discretionary codes on their own, DIT and DTT, total 813,779, or 27.4 times the public company count. Self-managed super funds total 707,573, or 23.9 times.

Add trusts and super funds together and they reach 1,788,793 records, 37.5 percent of the register, against 45.8 percent for companies of both kinds. A trust or an SMSF holds an ABN because the Australian Taxation Office requires one, and most of them employ nobody. That fact does not show in the file, and it is the single largest reason a raw ABR record count overstates the size of the Australian business market.

Australia has no direct European equivalent for either structure. A European register that maps every entity to a company form will misread a discretionary trading trust, and a data source built on that assumption will either drop 1,081,220 records or file them as companies. Both outcomes are wrong in a way that only shows up after the emails go out.

Where the states part company

The trust share is the widest gap in the table. Trusts make up 28.9 percent of South Australia’s records and 27.1 percent of Victoria’s, against 16.1 percent in New South Wales. Western Australia sits at 26.5 percent, Queensland 24.6, Tasmania 22.6, the ACT and the Northern Territory both 18.3.

Victoria records 351,913 trusts against 258,263 in New South Wales, 93,650 more, while holding 306,357 fewer records overall. The gap runs across the codes rather than sitting in one of them: Victoria has 139,769 discretionary investment trusts against 112,343 in New South Wales, and 123,840 discretionary trading trusts against 59,540. The extract carries no field explaining why, so we are reporting the counts and stopping there.

Private companies run the other way. They are 51.3 percent of the New South Wales file and 48.5 percent of the ACT file, against 37.6 percent in Tasmania and 38.4 percent in South Australia. New South Wales is the only jurisdiction where private companies pass half the register.

Self-managed super funds vary least. Seven of the eight sit between 13.6 and 15.8 percent, with New South Wales highest and South Australia lowest inside that band. The Northern Territory is the outlier at 10.6 percent, three points below the next lowest.

New South Wales also carries the largest Other family at 134,622 records, of which 63,166 are strata-title bodies corporate and 43,990 are other incorporated entities. Strata-title records describe buildings, so they inflate a state count without adding a single business a seller could call.

What entity type does to a B2B outreach list

Pull every active ABN for a state and slightly more than half of what comes back has no directors, no staff and no buying decision to make. Filter on entity type first and the list halves before you spend anything on enrichment.

Keep PRV and PUB and you have 2,184,960 records nationally that are companies on the ASIC register, with an ACN, an office and a person accountable for the entity. Keep the trust codes and you have 1,081,220 records where the registered address is often the accountant who set the structure up, and the trading business you actually want to reach sits behind a corporate trustee under a separate ABN. Keep SMF and you have 707,573 retirement funds. Keep STR and you have 167,987 buildings, reachable only through a strata manager who is not the customer.

The family split also changes what a state is worth. New South Wales looks 1.24 times the size of Victoria on raw records, 1,603,325 against 1,296,968. Count private companies alone and the ratio widens to 1.49, because Victoria’s file leans harder on trusts. A campaign sized on the raw counts will over-allocate to Victoria and under-allocate to New South Wales, and neither number is wrong. They answer different questions.

Our companion pages cover new registrations by state and year from the same extract, what the ASIC, ABN and ABR sources each contain, and the ABS count of actively trading businesses by state, which breaks the market down by industry and employment size rather than by legal structure.

Compiled by Ripe Leads from the ABR Bulk Extract dated 3 September 2026.