How many Australian air conditioning installers are in this dataset?

1,585, drawn from 501,275 scanned records and measured on 2026-08-08. That is a census of the air conditioning installers in this directory rather than of every air conditioning installer in Australia, and it skews toward businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all.

How many Australian air conditioning installers publish an ABN you can check?

14.8% — 235 of 1,585. The national rate across all trades is 9.8%, so air conditioning installers sit 51% 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 air conditioning installers list a phone number that doesn't match their website?

6.3%, or about 100 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 air conditioning installer have?

33, 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 air conditioning installer against a trade people call more often tells you very little.

Which state has the best-documented air conditioning installers?

Queensland leads on published ABNs at 18.4%, against 9.3% in Victoria. 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.

Research

Australian air conditioning installers, by the numbers

We checked what 1,585 Australian air conditioning installers publish about themselves, and how much of it holds up against an independent source.

Measured 2026-08-08 · free to reuse with attribution

14.8%

publish a checkable ABN

51% above the national rate of 9.8%.

43.6%

phone number confirmed against their own site

11% above the national rate of 39.2%.

6.3%

phone number contradicting their own site

31% above the national rate of 4.8%.

71.7%

have a website that loads

11% above the national rate of 64.7%.

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

Heating & Cooling publish a checkable ABN at 14.8%, 51% above the 9.8% national rate — better than most trades, though still under one business in six.

100 air conditioning installers — 6.3% — list a phone number that contradicts the one on their own website, 31% above the national 4.8%. That is worth knowing before you call: it is the signature of both a stale listing and of a lead-reselling middleman.

The median has 33 Google reviews against 29 nationally. That gap says more about how often households need air conditioning installers 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.

Heating & Cooling by state

States with at least 40 air conditioning installers in the directory. Smaller groups are held back rather than published as percentages that move too far on a single record.

Verification coverage for Australian air conditioning installers, by state
State	Businesses	ABN	Phone confirmed	Phone mismatch	Site loads	Median reviews
New South Wales	444	16.4%	50.2%	5%	71.8%	33
Victoria	396	9.3%	41.7%	7.1%	71%	34
Queensland	381	18.4%	40.9%	5.2%	71.1%	38
Western Australia	173	11%	38.2%	6.9%	72.8%	37
South Australia	96	14.6%	41.7%	11.5%	68.8%	31

Method, and what it can't tell you

1,585 Australian air conditioning installers, 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 air conditioning installers are in this dataset?: 1,585, drawn from 501,275 scanned records and measured on 2026-08-08. That is a census of the air conditioning installers in this directory rather than of every air conditioning installer in Australia, and it skews toward businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all.
How many Australian air conditioning installers publish an ABN you can check?: 14.8% — 235 of 1,585. The national rate across all trades is 9.8%, so air conditioning installers sit 51% 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 air conditioning installers list a phone number that doesn't match their website?: 6.3%, or about 100 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 air conditioning installer have?: 33, 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 air conditioning installer against a trade people call more often tells you very little.
Which state has the best-documented air conditioning installers?: Queensland leads on published ABNs at 18.4%, against 9.3% in Victoria. 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 air conditioning installer data 2026”, 2026-08-08. https://whotohire.com.au/research/trades/hvac

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