Where Australia's trade businesses are: 201 locations, ranked

Short answer

51,127 Australian trade businesses sit across 2,438 suburbs and 201 locations with a page of their own. The five largest — Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide — hold 30.5% of them between them, and that figure is lower than you would guess from population because metropolitan work is split across suburb-level locations: Berwick and Craigieburn are counted separately from Melbourne. Outside the metros the practical consequence is not worse tradespeople — it is fewer of them, so booking further ahead matters more than shopping around.

A directory's geography is a fact about where businesses are findable, which is not quite the same fact as where they are. Two things shape the table below: metropolitan density, and how a metro area gets divided — a business in Berwick is listed under Berwick, not under Melbourne, because "electrician in Berwick" is what people actually search.

The biggest locations

LocationBusinesses listedTrades covered
Melbourne, VIC4,35723
Sydney, NSW4,13123
Brisbane, QLD3,04623
Perth, WA2,44323
Adelaide, SA1,61123
Gold Coast, QLD1,46123
Newcastle, NSW1,01823
Sunshine Coast, QLD79623
Central Coast, NSW69522
Canberra, ACT67822
Geelong, VIC63123
Wollongong, NSW60523
Cairns, QLD52223
Hobart, TAS48420
Townsville, QLD46120
Dandenong, VIC41721
Darwin, NT41721
Logan, QLD41620
Toowoomba, QLD40820
Parramatta, NSW37619
Berwick, VIC37319
Ringwood, VIC36917
Frankston, VIC35521
Craigieburn, VIC34120
Joondalup, WA34122

What a thin location means for you

A location page exists here once at least 20 businesses are near it, and a trade-and-location page once at least 5 are. Those thresholds are deliberate: a page listing two businesses is not a comparison, and publishing it would imply a choice that is not there.

  • Book earlier. In a location with a dozen businesses in your trade, the good ones are booked out, not idle.
  • Widen the radius before you lower the bar. A business 40km away that answers the phone beats one nearby that does not.
  • Expect a travel charge, and ask for it as a number. Outside a metro it is the normal way distance gets priced.

Browse by location

Method

Locations are recovered from address text rather than trusted from a column — the state field is empty on most upstream rows — and folded so that a suburb and its parent location do not compete for the same query. Suburb pages exist for 507 suburbs whose name is genuinely searched and whose slug does not already belong to a larger location. Measured 2026-08-18.

Common questions

Which Australian city has the most trade businesses listed?
Melbourne, with 4,357 across 23 trades.
Why does my suburb not have a page?
A suburb page exists once enough businesses are near it — 20 for a location page — because a page listing two businesses implies a choice that is not there. The larger location covering your suburb will list them.

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