Source: ABS Australian Industry, Table 5, May 2022 and ASBFEO calculations, private sector industry. The ABS publish this data for selected industries, which excludes financial and insurance services. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Small business (employing less than 20 people) added over $438 billion of value in 2020-21. This was 33% of Australia’s total GDP, as shown in Table 1.

Source: ABS Australian Industry, Table 5, May 2022 and ASBFEO calculations, private sector industry. The ABS publish this data for selected industries, which excludes financial and insurance services.

As shown in Chart 1, the contribution of economic value compared by business size has not changed much over the past three years.

Source: ABS Australian Industry, Table 5, May 2022 and ASBFEO calculations, private sector industry. The ABS publish this data for selected industries, which excludes financial and insurance services. Small businesses are those with 0-19 employees, medium businesses are those with 20-199 employees and large businesses are those with 200+ employees. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

You can see in Table 2 that as well as adding a significant contribution to total value, small business adds more value than other business size in the following sectors:

• Agriculture, forestry and fishing (78% of total value added)
• Rental, hiring and real estate services (74% of total value added)
• Construction (57% of total value added)
• Other services (56% of total value added).

Source: ABS Australian Industry, Table 5, May 2022 and ASBFEO calculations, private sector industry. The ABS publish this data for selected industries, which excludes financial and insurance services.

Chart 2 shows that the largest contributions in dollar terms by small business to GDP are in the following industries:

• Construction ($74.2 billion)
• Rental, hiring and real estate services ($64.3 billion)
• Professional, scientific and technical services ($57.9 billion). 

When evaluating according to value added in dollar terms, Australia’s largest industry is mining. Interestingly, you can see that in Chart 2, small businesses contributed only 9% of all value added in the mining sector, compared to 84% from large businesses.