On paper, Australia is the easiest major economy to look up a company in. One national regulator — ASIC — one register, one law, in English, with a single company number that works everywhere. No 27 state boards, no federal patchwork.
Then you try to see who owns the company. The name and status are free; the directors and shareholders cost A$9 per company, the history A$18, the web of related roles A$36. There is no beneficial-ownership register at all — a gap the global anti-money-laundering watchdog has criticised for years. Most private companies never publish accounts. And a large share of Australian business runs through trusts, which appear on no public register anywhere.
This guide covers what the two national systems give you, what sits behind the paywall, and where Australia goes quiet.
Two identifiers, two registers
Every Australian company carries two numbers, from two different arms of government. The ACN (Australian Company Number, nine digits) comes from ASIC, the national corporate regulator, when a company is incorporated under the Corporations Act. The ABN (Australian Business Number, eleven digits) comes from the Australian Business Register, run by the tax office, and covers every business — companies, sole traders, partnerships and trusts alike.
They were supposed to become one system. The Modernising Business Registers program set out to fuse the ABR with ASIC’s registers — and was scrapped in August 2023 after projected costs blew out from roughly A$480 million to A$2.7 billion. The two databases remain separate: the company-law view at ASIC, the tax-facing view at the ABR. If you want a company’s directors and its GST status, you make two queries and join them yourself.
There is a third identifier worth recognising on sight: the ARBN (Australian Registered Body Number). A foreign company that carries on business in Australia directly — rather than through a local subsidiary — must register with ASIC and receives an ARBN, with a registered local office and Corporations Act obligations attached. When a counterparty shows an ARBN instead of an ACN, you are dealing with a foreign entity’s Australian registration, and its home-country register is where the substance lives. For how Australia’s identifiers compare with the world’s, see our global tax-ID format guide.
What is free — and what A$9 buys
The free surface is genuinely useful. ASIC’s company search — recently relaunched in a cleaner public beta — confirms a company exists: name, ACN, type, status, registration date, registered-office locality, and the list of documents it has lodged. ABN Lookup is free and answers the tax-side questions: is the ABN active, is the entity registered for GST, what kind of entity is it. And ASIC publishes register datasets as free bulk downloads through data.gov.au.
The paywall starts exactly where due diligence starts. The people behind a company sit in paid extracts, priced per company, per purchase:
That model is the article’s quiet headline. Data that Brazil prints on a free registration card and most EU registers give away — who directs and who holds the company — is metered in Australia. One check is trivial; monitoring a portfolio of thousands of counterparties at A$9–A$36 a look is a real line item.
How many companies exist
Australia’s register passed 3.7 million companies in 2026 and is growing fast — about 365,000 new companies were registered in 2025 alone, roughly a thousand a day. Registration is concentrated where the economy is: New South Wales and Victoria together account for around two-thirds of the register.
The company types you will meet
| Type | What it is | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Pty Ltd | Proprietary company limited by shares | The default — the overwhelming majority of the register. Maximum 50 non-employee shareholders; cannot raise from the public. Classified small or large by size tests. |
| Ltd (public) | Public company | Can raise from the public and list on the ASX. Heavier reporting: audited annual accounts, and continuous disclosure if listed. |
| Company as trustee | A Pty Ltd acting for a trust | Extremely common. The company appears on the register; the trust behind it does not — see the trust blind spot below. |
| Foreign company (ARBN) | An overseas entity registered to trade here | Registered with ASIC, searchable like a company, extracts available. The corporate substance — owners, accounts — sits in its home register. |
| Sole trader / partnership | Unincorporated businesses | Not companies — no ACN, no ASIC record. They exist publicly only through the ABN and any registered business name. |
One register detail worth knowing: a business name (a trading name) is registered with ASIC but creates no legal entity. The counterparty is always the entity behind the name — and since November 2025, old unregistered trading names no longer show in ABN Lookup at all.
The financials gap
Australia looks better than most on paper here, and worse in practice. Three groups must lodge financial statements with ASIC: listed and other public companies, and large proprietary companies — a Pty Ltd that meets two of three tests: consolidated revenue of A$50 million or more, gross assets of A$25 million or more, or 100-plus employees. Their audited accounts are lodged with ASIC and can be purchased as documents. A decades-old exemption for “grandfathered” family companies was abolished for financial years ending on or after 10 August 2022, pulling a layer of large private groups into the net.
Everyone else — the small Pty Ltd, which is most of the register — files nothing publicly. For credit work on a typical Australian private company, there are no public accounts to pull, and ASIC’s own enforcement wave shows that even where the duty exists, the report may simply not be there.
Two edge cases round out the picture. A small proprietary company controlled by a foreign company is normally pulled into the reporting net, though it can escape lodging if its registered foreign parent files consolidated accounts covering it, or under specific ASIC relief. And there is one genuinely free financials pocket: registered charities report to the ACNC rather than ASIC, and the free public Charity Register carries their annual statements — with financial reports for medium and large charities — making the non-profit sector, oddly, more financially transparent than the typical private company.
Who you can — and can’t — see
Direct ownership is on the record — behind the fee. A current extract lists a proprietary company’s shareholders (members) with share classes and holdings, alongside its directors and their appointment histories. That is more than some registers reveal; it just is not free, and for a public company the member list works differently — you will typically see the top shareholders, with substantial holders (5%+) disclosed to the market for listed entities.
Ultimate ownership is another matter. Australia has no beneficial-ownership register. The FATF — the global AML standard-setter — has repeatedly flagged the country’s limited visibility of who ultimately owns and controls companies as a money-laundering vulnerability. Reform is moving, slowly: the Treasury published design specifications for a public, ASIC-operated register of beneficial owners of unlisted entities (a roughly 20% threshold is proposed, covering some three million entities), but detailed consultation is only expected from early 2027, with the register to be built alongside ASIC’s new register platform. Until it exists, reconstructing an ownership chain means paid extracts, relational searches, and — for anything held through trusts or foreign vehicles — asking the counterparty.
Directors, meanwhile, all hold a director ID — a personal identifier introduced to kill off fake and duplicate directors. It is verified government infrastructure, but it is not public, and it only starts flowing into ASIC’s register through company filings from July 2027. For how Australia compares on ownership transparency, see our guide to beneficial-ownership registers worldwide.
Compliance and integrity signals
The integrity layer is where the free tier recovers. ASIC publishes a free, searchable banned and disqualified register — people barred from managing companies or working in financial services. Insolvency and external-administration notices are published free on ASIC’s notices site, and a company’s status field flags external administration. Personal bankruptcies sit in the National Personal Insolvency Index, searchable for a fee. And the PPSR — the national register of security interests over movable assets — shows, for a small per-search fee, whether a company’s assets are already pledged to lenders: a fast, cheap leverage signal.
Licensing is the other free layer, and Australia’s is unusually good. ASIC’s professional registers — all free to search — cover AFS licensees (anyone providing financial services), credit licensees, the financial advisers register (individual advisers, their history, qualifications and any bans) and registered liquidators. If a counterparty claims to provide financial services or credit, the licence check is free, definitive, and takes a minute. It is one of the strongest free integrity signals in the country.
One signal Australia routes differently: tax debt. Where Brazil publishes a public list of federal debtors, Australia has no public tax-debtor register. Instead, the ATO can disclose a business’s tax debt to registered credit bureaus — CreditorWatch, Equifax, Experian and others — when all of its criteria are met: an ABN, at least A$100,000 overdue by more than 90 days, no engagement with the ATO on the debt, and no active Tax Ombudsman complaint, after a 28-day notice. The signal exists, but it surfaces in commercial credit reports, not on a government page.
Demand for exactly this data is rising on a schedule. Australia’s “Tranche 2” AML reforms pull lawyers, accountants, real-estate agents and trust-and-company service providers into the AML regime — enrolment with AUSTRAC by 31 March 2026, full obligations from 1 July 2026. Tens of thousands of firms that never ran customer due diligence now must, against a register with no beneficial-owner layer to lean on.
Get Australian company data for free — just ask Regis
Skip the per-search fees for the basics. Regis is a free AI assistant — like ChatGPT or Claude, but wired to live data on 600M+ companies from 400+ government registries across 200+ countries. Ask in plain English and the answer comes back sourced and timestamped, with a link to the registry. The conversation is the AI part; the data is official filings, not a model’s guess.
Things you can ask
The trust blind spot
Here is the structural quirk every foreign compliance team eventually hits. A very large share of Australian small and mid-sized business is run through trusts — typically a discretionary (family) trust with a Pty Ltd as trustee. The trustee company is on ASIC’s register like any other. The trust itself is on no public register: the trust deed is a private document, and the beneficiaries appear nowhere.
The practical effect: the ASIC extract can be formally complete and still describe the wrong economic reality. The company you screened may own nothing and act entirely for a structure you cannot see. A trust’s ABN appears in ABN Lookup — useful confirmation it exists — but resolving who stands behind it means asking for the deed. It is the single most Australian data gap there is, and Treasury has said a parallel beneficial-ownership regime for trusts will follow the corporate register — eventually.
The corporate linkage gap
Australia’s economy is deeply internationalised — and the register, like every national register, stops at the border. The relational extract maps roles across Australian entities; it does not show the foreign parent, the group’s subsidiaries abroad, or the sister companies in other registers.
What’s changing
- The register is being rebuilt. After the merger program was scrapped, ASIC’s RegistryConnect program — funded with A$207 million over 2025–27 — launched a refreshed free search in 2026, with paid products, new APIs and a developer portal to follow.
- Director IDs reach the register. From 1 July 2027, companies must provide directors’ IDs to ASIC through their filings — linking a verified personal identifier to the public record for the first time.
- A beneficial-ownership register is designed, not built. Treasury’s specifications propose a public register for unlisted entities at a ~20% threshold; consultation is expected from early 2027. Listed-entity disclosure tightens first, with expanded substantial-holding rules taking effect from December 2026.
- AML coverage widens now. Tranche 2 obligations bite from 1 July 2026, and fees on ASIC’s price ladder continue to index every 1 July.
How to access Australian data at scale
One lookup at a time, Australia is easy. At scale, three frictions compound: the per-item fees on anything below the surface; the ACN/ABN split that leaves joining to you; and the absent layers — ultimate owners, most financials, and trusts — that no amount of searching returns. For how registry access compares country by country, see our business-registry API map, the primer on why registry provenance matters, and our roundup of ways to verify any company for free.
What the records won’t tell you
| Blind spot | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ownership is metered | Directors and shareholders sit in paid extracts — A$9–A$36 per company, per look. |
| No beneficial-owner register | Ultimate ownership is on no public record; a register is designed but consultation starts in 2027. |
| Most financials are dark | Only listed, public and large proprietary companies lodge accounts — and ASIC found 70% of checked large companies late. |
| Trusts are invisible | A huge share of business runs through trusts that appear on no register; only the trustee company is visible. |
| Two systems, one join | ASIC and the ABR were never merged; reconciling ACN-side and ABN-side data is the user’s job. |
| Tax debts surface privately | No public tax-debtor list; the ATO discloses large overdue debts (A$100k+, 90+ days) to credit bureaus instead. |
| No cross-border group | The register maps Australian roles only — not the foreign parent, subsidiaries or sister companies. |
Get Australian company data the way that fits your stack
Whether you need a live lookup, a feed into your risk engine, or the whole Australian base — ASIC and ABR identity joined to financials and ownership, linked to global parents — take it in the shape your workflow already uses.
Frequently asked questions
How do I search the Australian company register?
Use ASIC’s free company search (asic.gov.au) for the basics: company name, ACN, type, status, registration date, registered-office locality and the list of lodged documents. Anything deeper — directors, shareholders, history, documents — is a paid search product purchased per company.
What is the difference between an ACN and an ABN?
The ACN (Australian Company Number, nine digits) is issued by ASIC when a company is incorporated and identifies it under company law. The ABN (Australian Business Number, eleven digits) is issued via the Australian Business Register for tax purposes and covers all businesses — including sole traders, partnerships and trusts. A company’s ABN is normally its ACN with two leading check digits, but the two records live in separate systems.
Is Australian company data free?
Partly. The identity layer is free: ASIC’s basic search, ABN Lookup, bulk register datasets on data.gov.au, the banned-and-disqualified register and insolvency notices. The detail is paid: a current company extract costs A$9, a historical extract A$18, a relational extract A$36, and lodged documents A$18–A$36, with fees indexed each July.
How do I find out who owns an Australian company?
For direct ownership, buy a current extract: it lists a proprietary company’s shareholders and directors. For listed companies, substantial holders of 5% or more are disclosed to the market. Ultimate beneficial ownership is the gap — Australia has no beneficial-ownership register, so tracing through layers, trusts or foreign parents requires additional sources or asking the counterparty.
Does Australia have a beneficial ownership register?
No. Australia is one of the few advanced economies without one, which the FATF has repeatedly criticised. The Treasury has published design specifications for a public register covering unlisted entities at a roughly 20% ownership threshold, operated by ASIC, but detailed consultation is only expected from early 2027, alongside the rebuild of ASIC’s registry platform.
Where do I find an Australian company’s financial statements?
Listed and public companies publish audited accounts (and listed entities also report to the ASX). Large proprietary companies — meeting two of: A$50M+ revenue, A$25M+ assets, 100+ employees — must lodge audited financials with ASIC, purchasable as documents. Small proprietary companies, the vast majority, do not lodge accounts publicly.
What is a large proprietary company in Australia?
A Pty Ltd that meets at least two of three tests for a financial year: consolidated revenue of A$50 million or more, consolidated gross assets of A$25 million or more, or 100 or more employees. Large proprietary companies must prepare, audit and lodge annual financial reports. The old “grandfathered” exemption ended for financial years ending on or after 10 August 2022.
What is a director ID?
A director identification number is a personal, verified identifier every Australian company director must hold, introduced to stamp out fictitious and duplicated directors. It is administered through Australian Business Registry Services and is not public. From 1 July 2027, companies must provide director IDs to ASIC through their filings, linking the identifier to the register.
Why can’t I see the trust behind an Australian company?
Because trusts are not registered on any public register. A trustee company appears on ASIC’s register like any other Pty Ltd, but the trust deed is private and beneficiaries are not recorded anywhere public. A trust’s ABN can be confirmed in ABN Lookup, but resolving who stands behind it means obtaining the deed from the counterparty.
How do I check if an Australian company is insolvent or its directors banned?
Both checks are free. ASIC publishes insolvency and external-administration notices on its published-notices site, and a company’s status field flags external administration. The banned-and-disqualified register lists people barred from managing companies. Security over a company’s assets can be checked on the PPSR for a small fee, and personal bankruptcies in the National Personal Insolvency Index.
Can I download Australian company data in bulk?
Yes, in part. ASIC publishes register datasets — including company register extracts — as free downloads through data.gov.au, and ABN bulk data is also freely available. The paid layers (full extracts with officers and members) are not part of the free bulk files, which is where commercial providers and APIs come in.
What is an ARBN?
An Australian Registered Body Number — the nine-digit identifier ASIC issues to registered bodies that are not Australian companies, most commonly foreign companies registered to carry on business in Australia directly. An entity showing an ARBN is an overseas company’s Australian registration: it is searchable on ASIC like a company, but its owners and accounts sit in its home country’s register.
How do I check if an Australian business is licensed for financial services?
Free, on ASIC’s professional registers: search AFS licensees for financial-services firms, credit licensees for lenders and brokers, the financial advisers register for individual advisers (including their history and any bans), and the registered liquidators list. If an entity claims to provide financial services or credit and holds no licence, that is a definitive red flag.
Are business tax debts public in Australia?
No — there is no public register of tax debtors. Instead, the ATO may disclose a business’s tax debt to registered credit reporting bureaus when strict criteria are met: the business has an ABN, at least A$100,000 overdue by more than 90 days, is not engaging with the ATO, and has no active Tax Ombudsman complaint, after 28 days’ notice. The debt then appears in commercial credit reports, and is removed once paid or under management.
Where can I read an Australian organisation’s accounts for free?
Realistically, only for charities and listed companies. Registered charities report to the ACNC, and the free public Charity Register carries their annual information statements, with financial reports for medium and large charities. Listed companies publish audited accounts through the ASX. For a typical private Pty Ltd, no free public accounts exist.