Research
Australian panel beaters, by the numbers
We checked what 2,200 Australian panel beaters publish about themselves, and how much of it holds up against an independent source.
Measured 2026-10-03 · free to reuse with attribution
Of 2,200 Australian panel beaters measured in 2026, 20.7% publish an ABN that can be confirmed against the national register. Of the 891 whose listed phone number was compared with the number on their own website, 62.7% match and 8.3% contradict it. 84.1% of the 1,007 websites fetched responded, and 81.4% of the 1,394 cross-source matches found two or more independent sources. The median Australian panel beater has 52 Google reviews. The comparable national figures across all 78 trades are 21.5% with a checkable ABN and a median of 39 reviews. Source: WhoToHire, 2026-10-03.
20.7%
publish a checkable ABN
of all 2,200. In line with the 21.5% national rate.
62.7%
phone number confirmed against their own site
of 891 compared. 6% above the national rate of 59.2%.
8.3%
phone number contradicting their own site
of 891 compared. 8% above the national rate of 7.7%.
84.1%
have a website that loads
of 1,007 fetched. In line with the 81% national rate.
52
Google reviews for the median business
The national median is 39. 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
Panel Beaters publish a checkable ABN at 20.7%, essentially the national rate. Whatever drives the low national figure is not specific to this trade.
74 panel beaters — 8.3% of the 891 we compared — list a phone number that contradicts the one on their own website, 8% above the national 7.7%. 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 52 Google reviews against 39 nationally. That gap says more about how often households need panel beaters 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.
Panel Beaters by state
States with at least 40 panel beaters in the directory. Smaller groups are held back rather than published as percentages that move too far on a single record.
| State | Businesses | ABN | Phones checked | Phone confirmed | Phone mismatch | Sites checked | Site loads | Median reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 672 | 21.7% | 263 | 62% | 7.2% | 304 | 83.6% | 53 |
| Victoria | 636 | 19.8% | 232 | 56.9% | 10.8% | 264 | 86% | 54 |
| Queensland | 403 | 22.6% | 181 | 66.9% | 7.2% | 202 | 80.7% | 48 |
| Western Australia | 245 | 21.6% | 98 | 67.3% | 8.2% | 106 | 88.7% | 51 |
| South Australia | 174 | 12.1% | 85 | 67.1% | 3.5% | 97 | 81.4% | 47 |
Method, and what it can't tell you
2,200 Australian panel beaters. Every one of them gets the same four checks: 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.
Not all four have run everywhere yet, so the figures above are shares of what has been checked: 891 phone comparisons, 1,007 website fetches and 1,394 cross-source matches out of 2,200 businesses. A check that has not run counts in neither half of a percentage.
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.
ABN registration is the one figure taken over every business in the group rather than over a checked subset, because an absent ABN is not a failed lookup — read it as a floor. 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 panel beaters are in this dataset?
- 2,200, drawn from 569,128 scanned records and measured on 2026-10-03. That is a census of the panel beaters in this directory rather than of every panel beater in Australia, and it skews toward businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all.
- How many Australian panel beaters publish an ABN you can check?
- 20.7% — 455 of 2,200. The national rate across all trades is 21.5%, so panel beaters sit in line with the national average. 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 panel beaters list a phone number that doesn't match their website?
- 8.3% of the 891 we compared, or about 74 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 the comparison has not run for. 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 panel beater have?
- 52, against a national median of 39 across all trades. Half have fewer. Review counts track how often people hire a trade rather than how well it performs, so comparing a panel beater against a trade people call more often tells you very little.
- Which state has the best-documented panel beaters?
- Queensland leads on published ABNs at 22.6%, against 12.1% 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 panel beater data 2026”, 2026-10-03. https://whotohire.com.au/research/trades/panel-beaters
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