How to search business and company names in Australia

ASIC's business names register lists every registered business name. For each one, ASIC says it shows the name of the business name holder (which could be a person or an organisation), the ABN of the business, the address for service of documents, the principal place of business, the date the business name was registered, the next renewal date, and whether or not the registration is current.

ASIC says most information on the business names register is available for free. Extracts with current or historical details can be bought.

ASIC's company and organisation registers show, for free, a company's name and type, its ABN and ACN, its registration date, its next review date, the suburb, state and postcode of its registered office, and a list of the documents it has lodged with ASIC.

More costs money. When we checked on 8 October 2026, ASIC listed a current company extract at $10, a current and historical extract at $20, and each publicly available document a company has lodged at $20 to $50 depending on its length.

You can search by the organisation's name, by a business name it holds, or by a number such as its ACN.

When ASIC decides whether a new business name is identical to one already registered, it ignores some differences. Its rules for acceptable business names say it ignores whether a word is singular or plural, the words "the" and "a", capital letters, accents, spaces and punctuation. Compared with a company name, it also ignores "Australian" and "Aust", "Company", "Co" and "Coy", "Limited" and "Ltd", and "Proprietary" and "Pty".

ASIC's own example is "Australian Holiday Apartments" written with spaces and an exclamation mark at the end, which it treats as identical to "australiaholidayapartments" in lower case with no spaces.

So searching one spelling of a name may not show every name ASIC would treat as the same. Try it with and without spaces, in the singular and the plural, and with and without words like "the".

The business names register lists a holder for every name, and ASIC says that holder could be a person or an organisation. A sole trader who registers a business name appears as its holder, with the ABN of the business. A company appears on the companies register under its own name, and again on the business names register for each business name it holds.

That's why one business can turn up more than once in a search. A company called Bluegum Holdings Pty Ltd (an invented name) that trades as Bluegum Bakery is listed once as a company and once as the holder of the business name. Our guide on business name vs company name explains when a company needs a business name as well.

Names also leave the registers. ASIC's page on when it cancels a business name says the most common reason is that the registration wasn't renewed by its due date. A name cancelled recently can still be unavailable for a few months; our guide on checking whether a business name is available has the details.

ASIC says trading names aren't registered business names and don't appear on the business names register, so a name can be in use without being on either register.

A search also says nothing about trade marks. ASIC says registering a business or company name stops another business registering an identical or nearly identical name, but doesn't stop other people using similar words in their business name, and doesn't prevent legal action against you if you use someone else's trade mark. Trade marks are searched on IP Australia's register; our guide on how to do a trade mark search covers it.

ASIC's search finds names that match what you type. Our free business name search compares a name with every business and company name on ASIC's registers in one go and lists the ones that are the same, one letter apart, the same words in another order, or share the start of it. It checks every Australian trade mark on record at the same time.

It uses the data ASIC publishes, which we update weekly. The data we held on 8 October 2026 listed 6,669,307 current business and company names. Between 27 July and 27 September 2026, an average of 2,842 new business and company names were registered each weekday, by our count from the same data.

For the official record of any name, look it up on ASIC's register.