How many trade businesses are there in Australia?

"How many plumbers are there in Australia" is a question with no honest single answer, and the reason is worth more than the number. Every count depends on what you are counting: registered entities, businesses trading today, licence holders, or businesses a customer could actually find. Those are four different numbers and they are far apart.

What this directory counts

The withheld categories are not a secret and not a filter for quality: they are beauty, fitness, health and pet services that a site called WhoToHire is not built on. They stay measured because turning one back on is a one-line change and because a category we stopped measuring is a category we would stop being honest about.

By trade

Why the biggest number here is mechanics, not builders

19,372 mechanics against 8,982 builders is not a statement about the Australian economy. A workshop has a premises, a sign, a Google listing and a review history, so it is easy to find and hard to miss. A sole-trader builder may have a ute and a phone number, and is systematically under-counted by every method that starts from public data — including this one.

Where the data comes from

Two independent sources. One is a business-facts pipeline that has scanned 568,464 records; the other is an open mapping and registry warehouse. A business is only published when its category maps to one of the 23 trades, it is in Australia, and it carries at least a suburb plus a phone number or a website. 79.8% of the 45,414 businesses the cross-source match covers are corroborated by two or more independent sources — a floor, because the matcher runs on its own schedule and the newest arrivals reach it last.

The whole ranked dataset is published under CC BY 4.0, with the method beside it. If you want to check any number on this page, the file it came from is downloadable.

• Download the dataset
• The research pages
• How the ranking works