New Australian businesses registered by state and year (ABR data, 2026)

Method: what this page counts

Read the method before the numbers. Every figure on this page comes from a single source, pulled once, and the definition below decides what each count includes.

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 them into a local database of 4,770,875 rows. No other dataset feeds any table on this page.

What counts as a registration. One row is one Australian Business Number whose status in the extract reads ACT, meaning active on 3 September 2026. The year we assign to it is the year in ABNStatusFromDate, the date that active status began. For an ABN that has been active since the day it was issued, that date is the registration date. An ABN that was cancelled and later reactivated carries its most recent activation date instead, so a small number of older businesses sit in a later year than the one they first registered in.

Exclusions. We dropped every ABN with an entity type of IND, individuals and sole traders, because a sole trader ABN describes a person rather than a business with a legal structure. We also dropped ABNs whose status is anything other than active, so a business that registered in 2019 and cancelled in 2023 appears nowhere on this page. That makes every table a count of businesses registered in a given year and still active on 3 September 2026, rather than a count of everything that ever registered. Older years therefore read low against the year they happened, and the ten-year shape below carries that survivorship with it.

The state figure. State comes from the business address recorded against the main entity in the extract. 18,075 active records carry no state at all, 0.4 percent of the file, and we excluded them from every table rather than assigning them anywhere. The Australia column in each table is the sum of the eight states and territories, so each row adds up.

Two known quirks. 54 records carry a start date later than the extract date itself, running as far as 11 February 2027. The ABR forward-dates some GST and PAYG registrations, so this is a property of the register rather than a parsing fault. We capped every table at 3 September 2026 and left those 54 records out. Separately, 755,919 records carry a 1999 or 2000 date, the cohort created when the ABN system opened, which is why this page starts at 2016.

New registrations by state, 2016 to 2026

Two tables, one for the four largest states and one for the four smallest, covering the same eleven years. Each row is a year.

Across the eight states the eleven-year totals run 158,533 in 2016, 168,336 in 2017, 166,776 in 2018, 168,061 in 2019, 186,661 in 2020, 245,659 in 2021, 233,993 in 2022, 263,009 in 2023, 314,918 in 2024, 377,810 in 2025 and 261,993 for the part year to 3 September 2026.

One pattern holds in all eight columns. Registrations jumped in 2021, fell back in 2022, and have risen every year since. No state escaped the 2022 dip and no state has failed to pass its 2021 figure since.

Download the full table as CSV. The file carries the same eleven rows as the two tables above, with all eight states in one place plus the eight-state total column. Reuse it with attribution to Ripe Leads and to the Australian Business Register.

The 2025 headline: 377,810 registrations across the eight states

2025 is the most recent complete year in the extract. New South Wales registered 130,349 businesses that stayed active, 31,007 more than Victoria and 1.73 times the Queensland figure.

New South Wales and Victoria together hold 60.8 percent of the 2025 registrations. Add Queensland and the top three reach 80.8 percent. The four remaining states and territories share the last 19.2 percent between them, and the Northern Territory on its own accounts for 0.6 percent.

Rank by growth rate instead and the order changes. Western Australia added 25.2 percent, ahead of the Northern Territory and Queensland at 22.4 and 22.3 percent. New South Wales, which added by far the largest raw number, sits fourth on rate at 19.8 percent. The ACT grew slowest of the eight at 16.8 percent.

Year-on-year growth by state

Three consecutive year-on-year moves, plus the full ten-year change from 2016 to 2025.

Every cell in this table is positive. All eight states and territories grew in each of the three years shown, and all eight more than doubled their 2016 registration count by 2025.

The spread is wide. Over ten years the Northern Territory grew 198.1 percent against Tasmania at 108.2 percent. Tasmania spent 2022 to 2024 almost flat, at +3.5 percent and then +4.7 percent, before adding 19.9 percent in 2025. The ACT ran at +6.2 percent in 2023 and +19.1 percent the year after.

Reading each state on its own line

Each of these reads the table rows above and nothing else. Where a cause is not in the data, we have left it out.

New South Wales. The largest column in every one of the eleven years, at 130,349 in 2025 and 2.34 times its 2016 figure. It is also the only state whose count fell in two separate years outside the 2022 dip: 2018 came in below 2017, and 2019 below 2018.

Victoria. 99,342 in 2025, 2.27 times its 2016 count, the smallest ten-year multiple of any mainland state. Victoria has held second place in every year of the series.

Queensland. 75,403 in 2025 and 2.49 times 2016. It grew 22.3 percent in the most recent year, ahead of both larger states. Its count stood at 71.2 percent of Victoria’s in 2020 and 75.9 percent in 2025.

Western Australia. 38,016 in 2025, 2.72 times 2016, and the fastest single-year growth of the eight at 25.2 percent. Its 2024 to 2025 rate beat the eight-state average by 5.2 points.

South Australia. 22,735 in 2025 and 2.33 times 2016, against the eight-state multiple of 2.38.

Australian Capital Territory. 5,548 in 2025 and 2.43 times 2016. It posted the weakest 2024 to 2025 move of the eight at +16.8 percent, and the second weakest 2022 to 2023 move at +6.2 percent, behind Tasmania.

Tasmania. 4,217 in 2025 and 2.08 times 2016, the smallest ten-year multiple in the table. Its 2023 and 2024 figures, 3,360 and 3,517, sit within 5 percent of each other.

Northern Territory. 2,200 in 2025 against 738 in 2016, a multiple of 2.98 and the largest in the table. It works from the smallest base of the eight, and 2017 is its only fall outside the shared 2022 dip.

2026 stops at 3 September, so treat it as a part year

The 2026 row covers 1 January to 3 September 2026, 246 days, and it is not comparable to any full year above it. The eight states registered 261,993 businesses in that window, which is 69.3 percent of the 2025 total.

The state-level ratios sit in a narrow band around that figure. Queensland has reached 70.8 percent of its 2025 count, Western Australia 70.1 percent, South Australia 69.1 percent, New South Wales and Victoria both 68.9 percent, the Northern Territory 68.2 percent, the ACT 67.7 percent and Tasmania 66.4 percent. Nothing in the part year separates the states the way the 2025 growth column does.

Anyone quoting the 2026 row should say what it covers. Comparing 261,993 against 377,810 without the date range reads as a 30 percent collapse in registrations, and the extract gives no basis for that reading.

An ABN registration is not an ASIC incorporation

The ABR and ASIC run two registers, and this page counts one of them. An Australian Business Number comes from the Australian Taxation Office and covers any entity that deals with government or charges GST, including trusts, partnerships and incorporated associations. An Australian Company Number comes from ASIC and exists only for bodies incorporated under the Corporations Act.

A new company therefore produces two events on two different registers, usually days apart, and this page counts the ABN one. A new discretionary trust or a new partnership produces only the ABN event, and it appears here as well. Our figures are wider than a company incorporation count for that reason, and they are narrower in another: cancelled ABNs are gone from the file, so a count of incorporations for a given year will exceed our figure for businesses that both registered and survived.

Our companion page on ASIC, ABN and ABR data sets out what each register holds field by field. The ABS count of actively trading businesses by state is a third measure again, built from tax activity rather than from either register, and its own source note says a state-by-state formation trend is not available from that data cube. This page fills that gap from a different register, so treat the two as complementary rather than as versions of one number.

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