Over 104,000 new businesses registered in August alone – discover which postcodes are leading Australia’s startup revolution.
What’s happening: Australia registered 104,784 new ABNs in August 2025, marking a 21% surge year-on-year and the strongest August on record. The Lawpath New Business Index reveals sole traders are driving growth, with registrations among 18-24-year-olds jumping 62%.
Why this matters: This entrepreneurial boom signals a fundamental shift in Australia’s business landscape, with younger founders and suburban regions emerging as new economic powerhouses, reshaping traditional assumptions about where and how businesses are created.
Australia’s entrepreneurial engine hit overdrive in August 2025, with new business registrations reaching unprecedented levels that reveal a dramatic transformation in who’s starting companies and where they’re choosing to build them.
The newly launched Lawpath New Business Index recorded 104,784 new Australian Business Numbers (ABNs) registered in August, representing a 21% surge year-on-year and the strongest August performance on record. This milestone comes as 2,729,648 businesses were actively trading in Australia as of 30 June 2025, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Record-breaking month
The August figures paint a picture of sustained entrepreneurial momentum, with company formations also hitting 31,642 Australian Company Numbers, up 17% year-on-year. However, GST registrations remained flat at 24,514, highlighting what the data suggests is a new generation of microbusinesses and sole traders deliberately operating under the GST threshold.
“This is the clearest signal yet that Australia’s business landscape is being reshaped,” said Tom Willis, Lawpath’s chief marketing officer and co-founder. “We’re seeing entrepreneurs in their 20s, we’re seeing the suburbs and regions emerge as powerhouses, and we’re seeing more people start service-based ventures rather than traditional retail or property plays.”
The Lawpath New Business Index combines verified data from the Australian Business Register and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission with anonymised insights from thousands of registrations on the Lawpath platform. The methodology provides what the company describes as an accurate picture of who is starting businesses, where they are based, and which industries are driving growth.
Suburban powerhouses
The geographical distribution of new business registrations challenges conventional assumptions about entrepreneurial hotspots. Tarneit and Hoppers Crossing in Victoria’s outer west led the nation with 1,094 registrations, up 23% year-on-year, making postcode 3029 Australia’s highest-volume area for new businesses.
Other standout locations included Craigieburn in Victoria with 764 registrations (up 33%), Blacktown in New South Wales with 455 registrations (up 27%), and Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast with 444 registrations (up 24%). Notably, Cairns in far north Queensland emerged as a regional standout with 401 registrations, representing a 34% year-on-year increase.
These figures reflect a broader trend identified in recent research, with small businesses increasing by 7% over the past year, according to industry statistics. The geographic spread suggests entrepreneurial activity is dispersing beyond traditional city centres into suburban and regional areas.
Young entrepreneur wave
Perhaps the most striking demographic shift revealed in the data concerns age distribution. Registrations among 18-24-year-olds jumped 62% year-on-year, marking what analysts describe as a generational wave of entrepreneurship that’s reshaping Australia’s business landscape.
Sole traders emerged as the biggest single driver of growth, with 75,268 registrations representing a 30% year-on-year increase. This aligns with broader trends showing 97.2% of all Australian businesses were classified as small businesses in June 2024, according to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman.
The data also revealed shifting patterns in founder demographics, with India-born entrepreneurs representing 21.5% of registrations, up 14% year-on-year, and Pakistan-born founders increasing 26%. Conversely, China-born founders fell 13% year-on-year, suggesting evolving migration and business creation patterns.
Data-driven insights
The creation of the Lawpath New Business Index addresses what the company identifies as a long-standing gap in understanding Australia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Traditional discussions about small business have often been shaped by outdated statistics and anecdotal evidence, the index aims to provide founders, policymakers, and industry leaders with timely, accurate insights.
The research methodology combines official government data with platform-specific insights to create what Lawpath describes as more than just a snapshot. The index functions as a tool for identifying trends, challenging assumptions, and potentially inspiring policy action.
Industry observers suggest the data reflects broader economic shifts, including changing attitudes towards traditional employment, technological barriers to business creation becoming lower, and evolving consumer preferences that favour local and personalised services.
The August figures build on existing evidence of Australia’s entrepreneurial resilience, with 436,018 new businesses entering the market while 362,893 exited, resulting in 2.8% year-on-year growth in recent periods, according to Salesforce Australia analysis of ABS data.
As Australia’s business landscape continues evolving, the monthly insights from indexes like Lawpath’s may prove increasingly valuable for understanding not just the scale of entrepreneurial activity, but its changing character, geography, and demographic composition.
Full report here.
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