The Australian Business Register (ABR) is a register of all business entities and sole traders in Australia, based on Australian Business Numbers (ABNs), maintained by the Australian Taxation Office.

While ABR business data does not pick up all operations in a region (some companies are not registered at the location where they undertake commercial operations), the time-series data can be quite insightful. It can give you an indication of the short-term impacts of macro-events, and can also offer a sign as to how favourable local conditions are to establishing new businesses during normal times.

Changes in business counts by industry can show structural shifts within the economy and identify growth and declining industries. For example, growth industries will have high entry and exit rates due to the high failure rates of first movers and smaller high growth enterprises. Declining sectors will have low entry and high exit rates.

The raw business register dataset contains large numbers of ABNs which are not relevant to local government planning, including trusts, superannuation funds, non-active businesses and micro businesses not registered for GST. These have been filtered out of the data presented here, to provide a more meaningful dataset for Local Government Decision making.

Data are presented as aggregates of ABNs at the Local Government level for each of the time period. The graph of the number of GST registered businesses, the number of new GST registered businesses, and the number of cancelled GST registerations can be selected at the 1-digit ANZSIC classification level. For more information, including actual business locations and name and address details, LGAs are entitled to access the raw ABR unit record dataset directly from the ATO.