A look inside one month of the Australian business names register — what founders are calling themselves, what they're all calling themselves, and the patterns nobody talks about.
In April 2026, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission added 32,160 unique business names to the public register. We pulled every one of them — every café, every consultancy, every studio, every "Group" and every "Co" — and looked at the patterns. The findings tell a story about how Australians name things when nobody's watching.
Here's what one month of new Australian brands looks like.
3 words. 17 characters. Starts with S.
The median Australian business name registered in April 2026 was three words long, seventeen characters, and statistically most likely to begin with the letter S — the country's most-used naming letter, holding 10.2% of all new registrations.
If naming were random, each letter would start about 4% of names. The reality is wildly uneven. S, T, C, A, B and M together claim 47% of every new business name in Australia. The other twenty letters share what's left. X, Q, Z and Y combined start fewer than 2% of names — a rounding error in a register of 32,160.
The hot letter is S. Sweet, Studio, South, Sydney, Soul, Skin, Stone, Sage, Sun. Australia loves an S.
The twenty words that name a quarter of the country
Strip out the connector words (the, and, of) and look at what's left. Twenty words appear with such frequency that they show up in roughly one in four Australian business names registered in April.
- 1,503 Services — the runaway leader. 4.3% of every business name in April contained this single word.
- 639 Solutions — second place, never going away.
- 633 Group — a popular suffix.
- 614 Studio — once a creative term, now used across nearly every industry.
- 603 Cleaning — Australia is starting a lot of cleaning businesses.
- 585 Australia — the word itself.
- 535 Care — driven by NDIS, aged care, and personal services.
- 487 Property
- 396 Support
- 369 Consulting
- 346 Maintenance
- 329 Collective
- 283 AI — the surprise of the month. The fifteenth most-used word in Australian naming. An Australian business with "AI" in its name is being registered roughly every three hours.
Other heavy hitters: Home (301), Advisory (273), Health (214), Design (187), Digital (169), Cafe (152). Add them together with everything above and you have the vocabulary that names a quarter of new Australian businesses.
Padel appeared fifteen times in a single month
Some of the most interesting findings aren't in the high-frequency words. They're in the small, sharp clusters — a single word appearing across a dozen separate registrations in the same month.
April 2026 had a clear one: the word "Padel." Across the month, fifteen separate businesses registered a name containing it — some as companies, some as business names, scattered across the country with no apparent connection to each other.
Padel is a racquet sport that has expanded rapidly across Europe and the UK over the last few years — in places like Spain, Sweden and Italy it has gone from niche to mainstream, with thousands of courts built and a wave of clubs, brands and venues forming around it. What April's data shows is that same word now appearing, repeatedly and independently, in the Australian register: padel clubs, venues, a travel offering, retail and coaching concepts — fifteen of them, in thirty days. 15 Padel businesses in one month. Six incorporated as companies, nine registered as business names — fifteen separate entrants, no shared owners, all clustering around a single word in a single 30-day window.
When the same name registers more than once
After standardising plurals, fillers, ampersands and word order, 118 separate similarity clusters appeared in April's registrations — groups of two or more names sharing essentially the same core wording. Some of these belong to a single business registering multiple variants on the same day. Others belong to two or more separate businesses, each registering versions of essentially the same name within the same month, without any indication they knew about each other.
That second group is where the register gets interesting. Two different founders, two different ABNs, two near-identical names — both approved by ASIC, because each is a different sequence of characters.
A few other patterns worth noting
- 9.5% of April names are alliterative — first two words start with the same letter.
- 5.8% use the "X & Y" formula — by far the most overused structural convention in Australian naming.
- 5.4% include Australian geography — Sydney, Bondi, Aussie, Australia, or any state abbreviation.
- 3.6% start with "The". Over 1,200 new "The X" businesses opened in April.
- 3.4% end in "Co" — the startup-flavoured suffix is still everywhere.
- 490 new "Studios" opened in Australia in a single month.
What the register can't see
ASIC's role is to confirm that a proposed name is not character-for-character identical to another registered name. That's where the check ends. The register doesn't compare how names sound. It doesn't look at whether the .com.au is taken, or whether the Instagram handle exists, or whether a near-identical name already trades on a different platform.
That's not a flaw in ASIC's design — that's just what the register does. It records names. It doesn't evaluate them. Everything in this article — the 76-second cadence, the 20 vocabulary words, the Padel cluster, the 118 similarity groups, the alphabet crowding, the rise of AI — came from looking at the data ASIC publishes openly and asking questions it was never asked to answer. We did it because we built the platform that does this kind of analysis as a standard part of checking a name. Most of the naming patterns above are completely invisible at the point a business is registered.
32,160 unique Australian business names were registered in April 2026. By the time you finish this paragraph, another two will have been added.
If you've recently chosen a name — or you're about to — it's worth knowing where yours sits in the picture. Does it start with S like 10% of new businesses? Does it contain "Services" or "Group"? Does it share its essence with two others that registered in the last 30 days?
Most founders never find out. The thirty seconds it takes to look is the part that everyone skips.
Check yours against every domain, every major social, the ASIC business register, and IP Australia — in one search. Free for your first check. See what the register can't.
