Small Business Matters

We depend heavily on the small and family- run businesses in our lives – whether it is your childcare operator, sporting coach, your dog groomer, GP, local accountant or your favourite winemaker or café owner who work every day to delight customers and energise enterprise.

These are great people in plain sight, and we see them everywhere, every day.

Check out some of the key statistics from our Small Business Matters report below.

The full Small Business Matters report is available to download here or below. Read the media release.

*The ABS revised data on the number of small businesses for 2021-22, so these figures will not reconcile to previous publications.

A Nation of Small and Family Businesses

Almost 98% of all businesses are small businesses.

There were 2,506,012 small businesses operating in Australia in June 2022.

The number of small businesses increased by 164,172, or 7%, from the year before.

A common definition of small business used by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) are those businesses with a turnover of $10 million or less. Using this definition, 98% of Australian businesses are small businesses.

The vast majority (93%) of these businesses have a turnover of less than $2 million.

Table 1: Business numbers by annual turnover, June 2022

Annual turnover	Number of businesses	% of total businesses
Zero to less than $50,000	699,077	27.2
$50,000 to less than $200,000	823,844	32.1
$200,000 to less than $2m	856,169	33.3
$2m to less than $5m	108,939	4.2
$5m to less than $10m	39,227	1.5
$10m or more	42,644	1.7
Total	2,569,900	100

Source: ABS Counts of Australian Business 8165.0, Table 17, June 2022 and ASBFEO calculations.

Chart 1: Number of Australian businesses measured by employment size in June 2022

Chart 1_Australian businesses measured by employment size

Source: ABS Counts of Australian Business, Table 13a, August 2022 and ASBFEO calculations (excludes businesses that are not registered for GST).

Widespread Growth

The number of small businesses increased in all states and territories and across capital city and regional areas.

Almost seven out of 10 small businesses (1.7 million) are in a greater capital city area and three out of 10 (758,477) are in a regional area.

Queensland and Tasmania had the highest proportion of small businesses located in regional areas.

The top five regions with the highest number of small businesses were all in Greater Capital City areas: Sydney Inner City (NSW), Melbourne City (Vic), Wyndham (Vic), Boroondara (Vic), and Perth City (WA).
The non-capital city areas with the highest number of small businesses were Geelong (Vic), Ormeau – Oxenford (Qld), Newcastle (NSW), Toowoomba (Qld) and Townsville (Qld).