Research
Australian arborists, by the numbers
We checked what 630 Australian arborists publish about themselves, and how much of it holds up against an independent source.
Measured 2026-08-08 · free to reuse with attribution
Of 630 Australian arborists measured in 2026, 13.3% publish an ABN that can be confirmed against the national register, 49.7% list a phone number that matches the number on their own website, and 4.4% list one that contradicts it. 67.5% have a website that responds and 92.2% are corroborated by two or more independent sources. The median Australian arborist has 27 Google reviews. The comparable national figures across all 23 trades are 9.8% with a checkable ABN and a median of 29 reviews. Source: WhoToHire, 2026-08-08.
13.3%
publish a checkable ABN
36% above the national rate of 9.8%.
49.7%
phone number confirmed against their own site
27% above the national rate of 39.2%.
4.4%
phone number contradicting their own site
8% below the national rate of 4.8%.
67.5%
have a website that loads
In line with the 64.7% national rate.
27
Google reviews for the median business
The national median is 29. Review counts track how often people hire a trade, not how well they do it — a trade you call once a decade will always sit lower.
What stands out
Arborists publish a checkable ABN at 13.3%, 36% above the 9.8% national rate — better than most trades, though still under one business in six.
28 arborists — 4.4% — list a phone number that contradicts the one on their own website, 8% below the national 4.8%. That is better than the national picture, which is a reasonable sign the trade keeps its listings current.
The median has 27 Google reviews against 29 nationally. That gap says more about how often households need arborists than about the standard of the work, which is why the ranking on this site weights review volume on a log scale rather than treating a 5.0 from four reviews as equal to a 4.6 from three hundred.
Arborists by state
States with at least 40 arborists in the directory. Smaller groups are held back rather than published as percentages that move too far on a single record.
| State | Businesses | ABN | Phone confirmed | Phone mismatch | Site loads | Median reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 178 | 18% | 50% | 3.4% | 69.1% | 24 |
| Victoria | 161 | 11.8% | 49.7% | 4.3% | 70.2% | 28 |
| Queensland | 150 | 14% | 54% | 5.3% | 66.7% | 36 |
| South Australia | 51 | 7.8% | 41.2% | 5.9% | 66.7% | 29 |
| Western Australia | 48 | 8.3% | 45.8% | 2.1% | 58.3% | 23 |
Method, and what it can't tell you
630 Australian arborists, each checked the same way: an ABN lookup against the national register, a comparison of the listed phone number against the number on the business's own website, an HTTP request to that website, and a match against open mapping data maintained separately from Google.
This is a census of a directory, not of the trade. It covers businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all, which if anything biases these figures upward — a business too small to appear here is less likely to publish an ABN, not more.
Percentages are of every business in the group, including those where a check could not be completed. “Confirmed” means confirmed, not “confirmed among the ones we managed to check”. Review counts and averages are held; individual reviews are not, so nothing here can tell you whether a business's reviews arrived steadily or all at once.
Full method and national figures: the state of Australian trade business data.
Common questions
- How many Australian arborists are in this dataset?
- 630, drawn from 501,275 scanned records and measured on 2026-08-08. That is a census of the arborists in this directory rather than of every arborist in Australia, and it skews toward businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all.
- How many Australian arborists publish an ABN you can check?
- 13.3% — 84 of 630. The national rate across all trades is 9.8%, so arborists sit 36% above it. An ABN is free and public, so a missing one is usually a business that never put it on their website rather than a business without one.
- How many arborists list a phone number that doesn't match their website?
- 4.4%, or about 28 businesses. This counts only cases where a listed number directly contradicts the number on the business's own site — not businesses with no phone number and not ones that could not be checked. It is often a stale listing, and sometimes a lead-reselling service sitting between you and the person who does the work.
- How many Google reviews does the median Australian arborist have?
- 27, against a national median of 29 across all trades. Half have fewer. Review counts track how often people hire a trade rather than how well it performs, so comparing a arborist against a trade people call more often tells you very little.
- Which state has the best-documented arborists?
- New South Wales leads on published ABNs at 18%, against 7.8% in South Australia. Only states with at least 40 businesses are compared, because percentages taken over a handful of businesses move too far on a single record to mean anything.
Using these numbers
Free to quote, chart or republish under CC BY 4.0, which asks only for attribution and a link. The full aggregate dataset is available as a free download. If you need a cut that isn't published, ask.
WhoToHire, “Australian arborist data 2026”, 2026-08-08. https://whotohire.com.au/research/trades/arborists
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