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Australia registered 5,995 companies in one week and deregistered 4,341, two thirds of them in two batches - what the weekly ASIC register says about company births and deaths

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission publishes its whole company register as one open-data file every week: 4.46 million rows, every company ever registered in Australia, with its registration date and, when it applies, its deregistration date. No API, no account, a 79 MB ZIP under a Creative Commons licence. On 8 November 2026 I read the file published on 2 November with the new Australia New Companies Actor and looked at one full week, 19 to 25 October 2026.

5,995 births, about 5,900 a week

Call it 5,900 a week, 300,000 a year, for a country of 27 million people. By day of registration, the week of 19–25 October reads Monday 1,273, Tuesday 1,232, Wednesday 1,143, Thursday 1,102, Friday 1,008, Saturday 130, Sunday 107: a Monday peak, then a slow slide to Friday, and a few hundred online registrations over the weekend.

99.6% are Pty Ltd, and one in ten is a superannuation shell

The 608 superannuation trustees are the corporate trustees of self-managed super funds: a company created to hold a retirement fund, not to trade. They are 10% of the week’s registrations and they carry the word “SMSF” 54 times in their names. Anyone building a list of new businesses from the register should drop sub-class PSTC first; the Actor has a filter for it.

Public companies are rare (24 in the week) and 21 of them are limited by guarantee: foundations, associations, sporting bodies. Only two foreign companies registered in the week.

What the names say

The most frequent meaningful words in the 5,995 names: investment 69, care 58, smsf 54, construction 49, transport 45, ventures 44, projects 42, holding 42, logistics 36, collective 35, consulting 34, electrical 33, advisory 32, building 27, global 27. Care, construction, transport and logistics: the operating economy. Investment, ventures, holding, advisory: the holding structures around it.

Eleven companies were renamed within days of their registration. Most of the former names are typos: an “INESTCO” that became “INVESTCO”, a “COMMERICAL” that became “COMMERCIAL”. The register keeps both, and the Actor returns the former names with the date of the current one.

61% already have an ABN

An Australian company needs an Australian Business Number to invoice and register for GST. In the file of 2 November, 3,657 of the 5,995 companies registered one to two weeks earlier (61%) already had their ABN; the others were still waiting for it or had not applied. The ABN is also the key to what the ASIC file does not contain: state, postcode, GST status and entity type are on the public ABN Lookup, and every row of the Actor links to it.

4,341 deaths, in two batches

The same week, 4,341 companies were deregistered. Not spread over the week: 2,203 on Wednesday 21 October and 2,022 on Sunday 25 October, 8 to 53 on the other days. ASIC deregisters in bulk on set days, mostly companies that stopped paying their annual review fee or asked for a voluntary deregistration.

Age at deregistration:

The 2-to-5-year band is the largest: companies created around 2021–2024 that did not make it, or structures that served their purpose. 340 of the 4,341 (7.8%) were superannuation trustees, fewer than their 10% share of the births.

Reproduce it

The whole week, registrations and deregistrations:

{ "dateFrom": "2026-10-19", "dateTo": "2026-10-25", "events": ["registration", "deregistration"], "maxItems": 15000 }

Operating companies only, last two weeks:

{ "daysBack": 14, "companyTypes": ["APTY"], "subClasses": ["PROP"], "maxItems": 500 }

$3 per 1,000 companies, the first 20 of every run free, one free summary row per run. The file is weekly and 5 to 10 days behind: ask for a week that is at least ten days old, or schedule a weekly monitor that delivers each company once.

Source: ASIC – Company Dataset, data.gov.au, file of 2 November 2026 (COMPANY_202611.csv), licence CC BY 3.0 AU, read on 8 November 2026. Registration and deregistration dates as published by ASIC; ages computed from the registration date. Company names only: the file contains no directors and no addresses.