How many businesses are there in Australia, by state

Businesses by state and territory, 30 June 2026

Australia had 2,814,778 actively trading businesses at 30 June 2026, and the eight states and territories carry very different shares of that total.

New South Wales and Victoria alone account for around 61 percent of the national count. The remaining 1,708 businesses in the national total sit in other territories, which the source data does not break out individually. No current, directly comparable ABS figure exists at city level for Greater Sydney or Greater Melbourne, so this page stops at the state and territory level rather than estimating a city split.

These are actively trading businesses in the ABS sense, identified through ABN, GST or PAYG activity in Australian Taxation Office administrative data, not the broader ASIC company register covered further down this page. The two counts are not interchangeable, and the final section below explains why the gap between them is large.

Entry and exit rates vary more than the headline count suggests

Entry and exit rates move independently of the raw counts. The Northern Territory has the smallest business base of any state or territory but the highest entry rate in the country, at 18.5 percent, ahead of the ACT at 17.9 percent. Tasmania sits at the other end, with the lowest entry rate at 13.3 percent and the lowest exit rate at 11.6 percent, a market with less churn in both directions than anywhere else measured.

Western Australia posted the largest percentage increase in businesses over the year, up 4.6 percent, ahead of the Northern Territory’s 3.8 percent and Queensland’s 3.7 percent. New South Wales and Victoria grew more slowly in percentage terms, 2.8 percent and 2.6 percent respectively, despite adding the largest raw numbers of any state. A market can look flat on a growth-rate table and still be adding more new businesses than anywhere else in the country, simply because it started from a much larger base.

Nationally, the entry rate for 2025-26 was 16.9 percent against an exit rate of 13.8 percent, a net expansion of 3.1 percent. Every state and territory grew over the year, so the national picture of net growth holds at the state level too, even though the pace of that growth differs by a factor of more than two between the fastest state, Western Australia, and the slowest, Tasmania.

Business size: only 73,691 have 20 or more employees

Employment size, not the headline business count, is the split that matters most for outbound targeting. Of the 2,814,778 businesses operating at 30 June 2026, 1,818,575 are non-employing, meaning sole operators or businesses with no staff beyond the owner. A further 689,600 employ between one and four people, and 232,912 employ between five and nineteen.

Non-employing businesses, at 1,818,575, make up nearly two thirds of the national total on their own, a single category larger than every other employment-size band combined. That is a useful check on any targeting assumption that treats the typical Australian business as a company with staff on the payroll. Most of them are not.

The businesses with 20 or more employees, the group most B2B outbound is actually built to reach, number 73,691: 68,325 with 20 to 199 employees and 5,366 with 200 or more. That is 2.6 percent of the national business count. Every other figure on this page describes the full population of Australian businesses. This one describes the addressable set for most companies selling into other businesses at any meaningful scale, regardless of which state they are targeting.

Industry mix across the states

Nationally, Construction is the largest industry division by business count at 478,651, ahead of Professional, Scientific and Technical Services at 366,289 and Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services at 319,717. Transport, Postal and Warehousing follows at 261,109, then Health Care and Social Assistance at 227,702, then Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing at 170,185 and Retail Trade at 156,143.

Further down the list, Financial and Insurance Services accounts for 139,417 businesses, Other Services for 138,735, Accommodation and Food Services for 114,369, and Manufacturing for 90,879. Wholesale Trade, Education and Training, and Arts and Recreation Services sit smaller again, at 82,448, 44,236 and 40,792 respectively. Mining, at 8,755 businesses, is the smallest division measured by count despite its outsized share of national output, a reminder that business count and economic weight are two different rankings.

Health Care and Social Assistance was the fastest-growing division over 2025-26, up 6.7 percent. Transport, Postal and Warehousing runs the most volatile end of the market, with both the highest entry rate of any division, 26.5 percent, and the highest exit rate, 21.7 percent, meaning it adds and loses businesses faster than any other sector tracked in the release.

Administrative and Support Services, the division that contains employment placement, recruitment and labour supply services, stands at 130,330 businesses nationally. The ABS release does not break this division down to the individual recruitment and labour-hire classes, so a state-by-state count specifically for recruitment firms is not available from this data cube.

Companies, sole proprietors, trusts and partnerships

By legal structure, companies are the largest group at 1,271,197, ahead of sole proprietors at 848,300, trusts at 498,865 and partnerships at 196,015. A small public sector count of 401 rounds out the national total.

Trusts, at 498,865, sit ahead of partnerships in the national count, reflecting how common a trust structure is for small and family-run Australian businesses specifically. It is a structure with no direct equivalent in most European company registers, and it is easy to misclassify if a data source assumes every non-sole-trader entity must be a company.

This figure is worth pairing with a separate, larger one. ASIC’s own published statistics put the company register at 3,789,244 companies as at August 2026, roughly three times the ABS company count above. The next section explains why, and it matters directly for targeting: a raw ASIC extract includes millions of companies the ABS would not count as actively trading at all.

Four-year survival by state

Of the 2,539,724 businesses operating in June 2022, 1,571,449, or 61.9 percent, were still operating four years later in June 2026. Survival varies by state within a fairly narrow band.

Tasmania and South Australia, the two states with the lowest entry and exit rates in the current year, also post the highest four-year survival rates. The ACT, which runs one of the highest entry rates nationally, posts the lowest survival rate of the eight. On this data, a market that churns fast within a single year also tends to lose more of its businesses over a longer horizon, which is worth weighing against raw entry-rate numbers when they are used as a sign of opportunity on their own.

The cohort measured here is businesses operating in June 2022, tracked forward to see how many were still trading four years later, rather than a fresh survival study starting from the current year. A business that entered and exited within the four-year window, common among the newer registrations counted in the entry-rate table above, does not appear in this particular measure at all.

ABS actively trading businesses against ASIC registered companies

Every figure in the tables above comes from the ABS definition: an actively trading business, identified through ABN, GST or PAYG activity in Australian Taxation Office administrative data. It is not the same universe as ASIC’s company register, and the two should never be quoted against each other as if they were measuring the same thing.

ASIC’s own published statistics count 3,789,244 registered companies as at August 2026, more than the ABS figure of 2,814,778 actively trading businesses of every legal type, and roughly three times the ABS figure of 1,271,197 actively trading companies specifically. The difference is not an error in either dataset. ASIC counts every company registered under the Corporations Act, including dormant, shelf and non-trading entities that were never deregistered. The ABS counts only businesses it can see actually trading, of any legal structure, sole traders and trusts included alongside companies.

For anyone building a target list from this data, the distinction decides whether the list is realistic. A raw ASIC extract by itself will carry a large share of records that are not attached to a functioning business at all. The ABS figures on this page describe the market that is actually there to sell into, state by state. None of the state-by-state figures above have an ASIC equivalent published at the same level of detail, which is one more reason the ABS release, not a raw ASIC extract, is the right source for a state-level view of the Australian business population.