ABN Lookup is free and needs no login. Its home page describes it as useful to “check suppliers, partners” and “to check a business before buying”, which is also how a business can check a prospective customer.
The record, field by field
The ABR lists the public information ABN Lookup holds. The register card below draws those fields, with a note on each line from the ABR’s own help pages.
ABN Lookup · public details
- ABN and status
- “Active” means the registration is current; “cancelled” means the ABN “has been deactivated and is no longer current”.
- Entity name
- It is “the name that appears on all official documents or legal papers”, and “an entity only ever has one current entity name”. For a sole trader it is the person’s own name; for a company, the name registered with ASIC.
- Business names
- Registered with ASIC, and an entity may have more than one. Names registered before 28 May 2012 may not appear.
- Trading names
- The ABR “stopped collecting or updating trading names in May 2012”. Older ones still show “for historical reference with no legal status” and “cannot be updated or relied upon for business identity”.
- Location
- The state or territory and postcode of the main business location.
- ACN, ARBN, ARSN, ARFN
- Nine-digit numbers issued by ASIC. An ACN appears on ABN Lookup only if it is associated with an ABN.
- GST
- Goods and Services Tax registration.
- Charity markers
- Deductible gift recipient status, charitable tax concessions, registration with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, and approved worker entitlement fund status.
- Contact details
- Not held. The ABR says ABN Lookup “does not include the address, email, telephone or other contact details”.
- Industry code
- Not held: it is listed among the ABR’s non-public data.
Searching by name
Searching by ABN or ACN is the most efficient way in. A name search returns results ordered by relevance, and the ABR’s advice is to enter as much of the name as you know. A few behaviours are worth knowing before you build a list from it:
- The search “is fairly tolerant of spelling mistakes” and recognises common abbreviations, so Qld finds Queensland.
- Results come in two tabs: “active ABNs”, where both the name and the ABN are active, and “all ABNs”.
- A list stops at the first 200 records, shown up to 40 to a page.
- Advanced search filters by one or more states or by a single postcode; choose both and the states are ignored. It can also limit a search to entity names, business names or trading names.
- A name no longer current for an ABN is marked “(Historic)”.
- The search cannot tell the initials TA from an abbreviation of “trading as”, so some unrelated names can appear as exact matches.
From one record to many
Four official tools work at scale. Each draws on the same public details, so none adds a contact detail or an industry code.
| Tool | What the ABR says it does | How it is reached |
|---|---|---|
| ABN Lookup tools | Spreadsheet tools for many searches at once: by ABN or ACN, by name, and an advanced tool that can “retrieve a list of ABNs” for a selected postcode. | Downloaded from ABN Lookup, accepting its terms and conditions. |
| Web services | Put ABN Lookup validation and data into your own applications, for example to pre-fill forms and keep stored ABN details up to date. | Free. You accept the web services agreement and are emailed an authentication GUID. |
| Bulk extract | A weekly XML extract of a subset of the public details, including names, ABN status, entity type, state and postcode, and GST status. | Downloaded from data.gov.au, where the files carry a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence. |
| Statistical query | Counts of ABNs by state, postcode or entity type, with options for active ABNs only, GST-registered ABNs only, or new registrations in a chosen year. | On the ABN Lookup website. |
As this guide reads them, these tools are good at “how many, and where” (how many GST-registered companies sit in one postcode, say) and silent on “who, exactly, should I contact”.
How fresh it is, and how far to rely on it
ABN Lookup receives updates from the Australian Business Register every hour, but the information depends on businesses updating their own details when they change. New registrations and updates must first appear in the ABR before they reach ABN Lookup.
The ABR’s disclaimer is plain about the limits. Neither the Registrar nor the Federal Government guarantees that the information is “accurate, up to date or complete”, and its advice is to “consider verifying any information obtained through this service with other sources”. It goes further on two points that matter in business dealings. A listing in the ABR, it says, “is not a warranty” that the entity is commercially viable or still in existence, nor that any apparent use of its Australian Business Number has in fact been properly authorised by the entity.
From the ABN Lookup disclaimer.
The second half is the one to remember when an invoice or an order quotes an ABN: the number can be real and still be used by someone it does not belong to.
For more about a company, the ABR points to ASIC’s registers. That is the next folio: checking a company on ASIC’s registers.