ABN Lookup Australia - Business Register Search

ABN Lookup Australia - ABN Search & Business Register

Search all 8,986,263 active Australian Business Numbers by name, postcode or ABN and export the full register record for every match. Every row carries the ABN, entity name, ABN status and date, entity type, GST registration, main business location, ACN, and charity and deductible gift recipient flags. No login, no API key, no registered GUID. Exports to CSV, JSON, Excel and XML.

The official ABN Lookup web services want you to register for a GUID before you can call them, then hand back a thinner record than the public page does. This scraper reads the public pages instead, so it needs no credentials at all and returns the blocks the JSON endpoints simply do not carry: registered business names, pre-2012 trading names, deductible gift recipient funds, charity tax concessions and the full historical record. It also joins the ACNC charity register on data.gov.au, so a charity row can come back with its street address, website, size and charitable purposes attached.

Who uses it	What they scrape ABN Lookup for
Sales and lead generation teams	Build territory lists of active, GST registered businesses by state and postcode
Accountants and bookkeepers	Verify ABN status and GST registration before invoicing or withholding
Compliance and KYB analysts	Confirm an entity exists, is active, and match its ACN to the ASIC register
Fundraising and grants teams	Find deductible gift recipients and registered charities in a postcode
Data and research teams	Track ABN registrations by entity type, state and year from the official statistics

What it does

• 🔎 Searches by name across entity names, registered business names and pre-2012 trading names, one filter each
• 🏢 Opens the full register record for every match: ABN status and date, entity type, GST registration and date, main business location
• 🧾 Adds ASIC registration with the ACN, ARBN, ARSN or ARFN and a direct link to the ASIC record
• 🎁 Reads deductible gift recipient status, the endorsement date, the section 30-15 item, and every fund the entity operates
• ❤️ Reads charity status, the ACNC registration and every endorsed tax concession with its start date
• 🌏 Joins the ACNC charity register for the charity's address, website, size, responsible persons and charitable purposes
• 🕓 Pulls the full history: entity name, ABN status, GST and location changes, each with a from and to date
• 📊 Runs the official statistical query for ABN counts by entity type, entity group, state, year and GST registration
• ✅ Validates the ABN checksum locally, so a mistyped number is reported instead of silently returning nothing
• 🧮 Computes flags you would otherwise derive: isActive, gstRegistered, abnAgeYears, gstRegisteredYears and per-block counts

What you can do with ABN Lookup data

Build a clean, verified prospect list. Search a trade or profession, expand by state to get past the register's 40 result ceiling, and keep only the rows where isActive is Yes and gstRegistered is Yes. A GST registered business has declared turnover above the threshold, which is the cheapest revenue signal in Australian public data.

Verify a supplier before you pay them. Feed a list of ABNs straight into the ABNs input and get back status, entity name and entity type for each. If isActive comes back No, the ABN was cancelled and the date it was cancelled from is in abnStatusFrom. If hasAsicRegistration is Yes, the acn field matches the entity's ASIC record.

Map the charity and fundraising sector. Set the search option to Charity tax concessions or Deductible gift recipients, give it a postcode, and tick the ACNC charity profile block. You get every registered charity in that postcode with its address, website, size, financial year end and the beneficiary groups it serves.

Track registrations over time. Turn on ABN statistics with the New registrations option and a year, grouped by entity type, and you get the official count of ABNs first activated that year for each entity type, straight from the register rather than an estimate.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No credentials	The official web services need a registered GUID; this needs nothing
More per record	Business names, trading names, DGR funds, tax concessions and history are not in the official JSON
Beats the 40 result cap	Expand by state re-runs each search per state, lifting the ceiling to about 320 matches per term
Filters measured, not guessed	Every state, name type, postcode and search option filter was tested against row totals
Charity enrichment built in	Joins the 66,191 record ACNC charity register on data.gov.au by ABN
Pay only for what returns	Optional blocks are billed only when the entity actually has that data

How it compares

There are a dozen ABN scrapers on the Store and most of them are the same actor: one event, one flat row, entity name and status and nothing else. ryanclinton/australia-abn-lookup is the most used of them at $2.00 per 1,000 records, and scrapeworks/australian-business-register-search goes down to $1.00. This actor is more expensive per record and does considerably more per record, so the comparison is worth making honestly.

	This actor	ryanclinton/australia-abn-lookup	scrapeworks/australian-business-register-search
Price per 1,000 records	$7.00	$2.00	$1.00
Billable events	16	2	2
Fields in the base row	31	Entity name, ABN, status	Entity name, ABN, status
Business and trading names	Yes	No	No
DGR status and funds	Yes	No	No
Charity status and tax concessions	Yes	No	No
ACNC register enrichment	Yes	No	No
Full ABN history	Yes	No	No
ABN statistics	Yes	No	No
Beats the 40 result cap	Yes	No	No

If all you need is an entity name for a known ABN, the cheaper actors will do it. If you need the record a compliance file or a fundraising list actually requires, the extra blocks here are the difference.

What a business record looks like

One real, unedited row from the verified run, using the default settings:

{
  "abn": "45004189708",
  "abnFormatted": "45 004 189 708",
  "entityName": "COLES SUPERMARKETS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD",
  "abnStatus": "Active",
  "abnStatusFrom": "14 Feb 2000",
  "isActive": "Yes",
  "abnAgeYears": 26.5,
  "entityTypeName": "Australian Private Company",
  "gstStatus": "Registered",
  "gstFrom": "01 Jul 2000",
  "gstRegistered": "Yes",
  "gstRegisteredYears": 26.2,
  "state": "VIC",
  "postcode": "3123",
  "mainBusinessLocation": "VIC 3123",
  "acn": "004189708",
  "hasAsicRegistration": "Yes",
  "businessNamesCount": 11,
  "tradingNamesCount": 3,
  "dgrEndorsed": "No",
  "dgrFundsCount": 0,
  "isCharity": "No",
  "charityType": "N/A",
  "taxConcessionsCount": 0,
  "abnLastUpdated": "20 Nov 2025",
  "recordExtracted": "28 Aug 2026",
  "matchedName": "COLES SUPERMARKETS",
  "matchedNameType": "Business Name",
  "searchTerm": "coles supermarkets",
  "abnLookupUrl": "https://abr.business.gov.au/ABN/View?abn=45004189708",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-27T16:23:46.865Z"
}

Ticking the optional blocks adds businessNames, tradingNames, asicNumber, asicUrl, dgrFrom, dgrItem, dgrFunds, acncStatus, acncUrl, charityTaxConcessions, the ACNC profile fields, and the four history arrays, for 69 distinct keys in total.

Configure the run

Give it search terms, exact ABNs, or ABN Lookup URLs, then decide how deep each record should go. Filters apply to the searches; ABNs you supply directly are always looked up in full. Every optional block is off by default, so a default run is the cheap base record and nothing else.

Find every active business matching a name, nationally:

{
  "searchTerms": ["coles supermarkets"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Build a GST registered lead list for Victoria and New South Wales, past the 40 result cap, with ASIC numbers:

{
  "searchTerms": ["plumbing", "electrical services", "landscaping"],
  "states": ["VIC", "NSW"],
  "expandByState": true,
  "includeAsicRegistration": true,
  "includeBusinessNames": true,
  "maxItems": 2000
}

Pull every registered charity in a postcode with its full ACNC profile and tax concessions:

{
  "postcode": "3000",
  "searchOption": "charity",
  "includeAcncRegistration": true,
  "includeCharityTaxConcessions": true,
  "includeDgrStatus": true,
  "includeAcncCharityProfile": true,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Free users

Free Apify accounts get a 10 row preview of every run, which is enough to check the fields and the shape before you commit. Paid plans lift the cap to 1,000,000 rows per run. Upgrade your Apify plan to remove the preview limit.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account. It comes with $5 of free credit, enough for about 700 business records.
2. Open the actor, put a business name in Search terms or an ABN in ABNs, and set Max items.
3. Tick only the optional blocks you actually need, since each one is billed separately and only when it returns.
4. Click Start, then export the dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel or XML, or pull it from the Apify API.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Add the actor to any MCP capable agent and ask for Australian business data in plain language:

claude mcp add apify --transport http https://mcp.apify.com --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"

Then ask your agent things like:

• "Look up ABN 45 004 189 708 and tell me if it is active and registered for GST."
• "Find every registered charity in postcode 3000 and give me the ones with a Public Benevolent Institution endorsement."
• "Search ABN Lookup for plumbing businesses in Victoria and New South Wales and export the GST registered ones."

Troubleshooting

I get no results at all. A postcode on its own only returns rows when the search option is Deductible gift recipients or Charity tax concessions. With the All option, ABN Lookup needs a search term as well. Add a term or change the search option.

I only ever get 40 rows per search. That is the register's own ceiling, not a limit of this actor. ABN Lookup stops every search at 40 matches and there is no pagination. Turn on Expand by state to re-run the term once per state, or add words to narrow the term.

A field I expected is empty. Most blocks only exist for some entities. acn is N/A for sole traders and partnerships that were never registered with ASIC, charityType is N/A for anything that is not an endorsed charity, and dgrItem is N/A unless the entity is an endorsed deductible gift recipient. Empty means the register does not hold it for that entity.

My ABN was skipped with a checksum warning. ABN Lookup returns a normal looking page for an invalid ABN, so the actor validates the checksum first. A number that fails it was mistyped: check the digits rather than the actor.

The run is slower than I expected. Each optional block that needs its own request, ABN history and ACNC charity profile, adds one request per record. A run with every block ticked does three requests per record: the verified run averaged about three records a second. Turn off the blocks you do not need, or raise Max concurrency.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Do I need an ABN Lookup GUID or API key?	No. This reads the public pages, which need no registration at all.
How many ABNs are there?	8,986,263 are currently active and 20,480,745 have been issued in total, per the register's own statistics on 27 August 2026.
Can I look up a company by its ACN?	Yes. Put the 9 digit ACN, ARBN, ARSN or ARFN in the ABNs input and it resolves to the owning ABN.
Can I search by postcode alone?	Only with the Deductible gift recipients or Charity tax concessions search option. The All option needs a name too.
Why do I get fewer rows than matches found?	The same ABN appears once per matching name, so a term can match an entity three times. Rows are deduplicated by ABN.
Does it return cancelled ABNs?	Yes, if you tick Include cancelled ABNs. Cancelled entities carry ABN status Cancelled and the date in abnStatusFrom.
How current is the data?	Every row carries recordExtracted, the register's own extraction date, and abnLastUpdated, the date the entity's details last changed.
How fast is it?	The verified run did 838 records with every optional block ticked, about 2,550 requests, in 283 seconds, on 512 MB.
Is scraping ABN Lookup legal?	ABN Lookup is a public government register published for exactly this kind of verification, and its robots.txt permits crawling the pages this actor reads.
What is the difference between a business name and a trading name?	Business names are current registrations on the national Business Names Register. Trading names are historical: the ABR stopped collecting them in May 2012.
Can I get a charity's financial data?	Not from ABN Lookup. The ACNC charity profile block adds size, responsible persons and financial year end, but not financial statements.

Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial scraper and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Australian Business Register, the Australian Taxation Office, ASIC or the ACNC. It collects only data that is already published publicly on ABN Lookup and data.gov.au, and collects no private or personal data beyond what those public registers themselves display. Business register records about sole traders can constitute personal data under the GDPR, the CCPA and the PIPL; you are responsible for handling any such data lawfully, including honouring access and erasure requests where those laws apply to you.