ASIC Bulk Company Register (Australia)

Every company on Australia's official corporate register, straight from ASIC's (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) own bulk open-data extract on data.gov.au - not a scrape of the paid, CAPTCHA-protected ASIC Connect search. The Actor streams the ~400 MB national file (verified 2026-09-21: 399,800,168 bytes / 4,010,895 companies), resolves each company's current name from ASIC's own former-name/current-name rows, and delivers clean, flat JSON with the ACN, ABN, type, status, registration date and full name history - filtered by registration date, status, company type, previous state of registration and name keywords.

What you get

One record per company (id = ACN):

Field	Description
id	ACN (Australian Company Number), also acn
source	Always data.gov.au/asic
url	The dataset page (https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/asic-companies) - ASIC does not publish a stable per-company URL in this open file; see "Data source and licence"
fetchedAt	ISO timestamp of the run
companyName	Current registered name, resolved from ASIC's name-history rows (see below)
acn	9-digit Australian Company Number (an ARBN when type is RACN, per ASIC's own data dictionary)
type / typeDescription	Raw ASIC code (APTY, APUB, FNOS, RACN, CCIV) and its decoded label
class / classDescription	Liability class code and label (e.g. LMSH = Limited by shares)
subClass / subClassDescription	Sub-class code and label (e.g. PROP = Proprietary company, other)
status / statusDescription	Status code and label (e.g. REGD = Registered, DRGD = Deregistered)
dateOfRegistration	ISO date
dateOfDeregistration	ISO date, or null while still registered (published by ASIC since 11 March 2025)
previousStateOfRegistration	State the company was first registered in before the national scheme, e.g. NSW - populated for ~5% of companies (see "Limits and freshness")
stateRegistrationNumber	That state's own registration number, where applicable
modifiedSinceLastReport	true when ASIC's record changed since the previous weekly file
abn	Australian Business Number, or null when the company has none (ASIC publishes 0; the Actor converts it)
formerNames	Earlier names on record (array), in ASIC's own row order - not guaranteed chronological. Empty if never renamed
currentNameStartDate	ISO date the current name took effect, or null if never renamed
datasetLastModified	Last-modified timestamp of the source file at fetch time

Input

Input	Type	Default	Description
allDates	boolean	true	The file is not sorted by registration date (verified 2026-09-21), so any date filter forces a full scan of the ~400 MB file. Default true keeps the Store "Try it" run cheap: it reads from the start of the file and stops as soon as maxItems companies match. Set to false, or supply dateFrom/dateTo (either does this automatically), to filter by date.
daysBack	integer	7	Used only when the date filter is active. The file refreshes weekly, so a narrow window can land almost entirely after the newest data - see "Limits and freshness".
dateFrom	string	-	Earliest Date of Registration, YYYY-MM-DD. Setting this (or dateTo) switches the date filter on. Overrides daysBack.
dateTo	string	today	Latest Date of Registration, YYYY-MM-DD.
statuses	array	["REGD"]	ASIC status codes to keep (see the legend above). Empty list = every status, including deregistered and struck-off companies.
types	array	[]	ASIC type codes to keep (APTY, APUB, FNOS, RACN, CCIV). Empty = all (99.0% of the register is APTY).
previousStates	array	[]	Filter on previousStateOfRegistration. Honestly, this only ever matches ~5% of companies - those first registered under a state's own corporate law before the 1990s national scheme; every company registered since then has this field empty, so it does not usefully narrow a "recent companies" search.
keywords	array	[]	Case-insensitive substrings; a company is kept when its current name contains any of them (OR).
maxItems	integer	500	Stop after this many companies (you are charged per result). Kept at the standard default because the cost is capped by maxItems regardless of file size - the compute time is a separate, documented trade-off (see "Limits and freshness").

Default input (cheapest possible run - no date filter, currently-registered companies, first 500 found from the start of the file):

{ "allDates": true, "statuses": ["REGD"], "maxItems": 500 }

Companies newly registered in the last 30 days in mining/finance-adjacent names (accepts the full-scan cost):

{ "allDates": false, "daysBack": 30, "keywords": ["mining", "resources", "capital"], "maxItems": 2000 }

Every foreign company on the register, regardless of status:

{ "allDates": true, "types": ["FNOS"], "statuses": [], "maxItems": 5000 }

Output example

A real record from the 2026-09-14 file (run 2026-09-21, keywords: ["nippon life"], statuses: []) - a company renamed three times:

{
  "id": "000000402",
  "source": "data.gov.au/asic",
  "url": "https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/asic-companies",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-21T03:01:04.146Z",
  "companyName": "NIPPON LIFE INSURANCE AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND LIMITED",
  "acn": "000000402",
  "type": "APUB",
  "typeDescription": "Australian public company",
  "class": "LMSH",
  "classDescription": "Limited by shares",
  "subClass": "ULST",
  "subClassDescription": "Unlisted public company",
  "status": "REGD",
  "statusDescription": "Registered",
  "dateOfRegistration": "1886-12-31",
  "dateOfDeregistration": null,
  "previousStateOfRegistration": "NSW",
  "stateRegistrationNumber": "00020825",
  "modifiedSinceLastReport": false,
  "abn": "90000000402",
  "formerNames": ["MLC LIFE LTD", "MLC LIMITED", "THE MUTUAL LIFE & CITIZENS' ASSURANCE CO LTD"],
  "currentNameStartDate": "2025-09-26",
  "datasetLastModified": "2026-09-14T14:53:34.014830"
}

Pricing

Pay per result: US$0.001 per company returned, i.e. US$1 per 1,000 companies. Nothing is charged for a run that returns no companies (verified: every edge-case run below with zero matches logged pushed: 0 and no charge attempt). Apify platform usage (compute, storage) is billed separately by Apify; the free plan limits how much compute a run may use, so a full-file scan (see below) may need a paid plan for very large maxItems values.

Data source and licence

• Source: "ASIC - Company Dataset", published by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on data.gov.au: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/asic-companies. The Actor resolves the current CSV resource at run time via the CKAN package_show API rather than hard-coding a filename, because the published file is renamed every week (e.g. company_202609.csv); verified 2026-09-21 that the resource id itself (5c3914e6-...) stays stable across weekly refreshes.
• Format: despite the .csv extension the file is TAB-delimited with a UTF-8 BOM (confirmed directly against ASIC's own "Company Dataset - Help File", 11/07/2025, and against a live download). No comma-CSV quoting is used or needed.
• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/, read directly from the dataset page's licence badge and schema markup on 2026-09-21. This permits commercial reuse with attribution. Suggested credit: "Source: ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) via data.gov.au, licensed under CC BY 3.0 AU."
• Not a scrape: several competing Store listings scrape ASIC Connect (ASIC's own paid, login/CAPTCHA-gated search service - "Accessing some information may attract a fee", per ASIC's help file). This Actor only reads ASIC's own bulk open-data extract; no login, no CAPTCHA, no paid ASIC Connect calls.
• Personal data: this file lists companies, not individuals or sole traders (sole traders/partnerships are on ASIC's separate Business Names register, not covered here). Checked the full Type legend against 4,445,221 live rows (2026-09-21): the only values are APTY, APUB, FNOS, RACN and CCIV, all body-corporate types - none represent an individual. A company's registered name can occasionally itself be a person's name (e.g. a namesake proprietary company), but no personal address or contact field is published in this dataset.

Limits and freshness

• Size and volume (measured 2026-09-21 against the live file): 399,800,168 bytes (399.8 MB / 381.3 MiB), last modified by ASIC 2026-09-14. 4,445,221 data rows resolve to 4,010,895 companies after dedup. 332,447 companies (8.3%) have been renamed at least once (up to 14 names for the most-renamed company found); the rest (3,678,448) have a single row.
• Former-name dedup: ASIC publishes one row per historical name plus one row for the current name, marked Current Name Indicator = Y. The Actor keeps exactly one output record per ACN: the Y-marked row when present, or (10 companies out of 4,010,895, 0.0002%, all found in a full scan) the true current name recovered from the Current Name column that ASIC still publishes on every historical row when no row is explicitly marked Y - verified against the live file rather than assumed. Every company's rows are contiguous in the file (verified by comparing a full row-by-row grouping against a full-file distinct-ACN count: both equal 4,010,895), so streaming needs only a tiny per-company buffer, never the whole file.
• Not sorted by date: registration dates are not monotonic through the file (measured: 66,486 date decreases across a 2.3M-row slice) - only loosely correlated with ACN order. A date-filtered run must therefore scan the whole file. Measured full-scan times on this machine, 2026-09-21 (no matches, so no early exit): 11.2s, 12.6s and 12.7s across three runs, peaking at ~130 MB RSS. An unfiltered run (default allDates: true) instead stops as soon as maxItems matches are found from the start of the file - measured at 0.1-0.9 seconds for maxItems 2-500.
• Weekly refresh, narrow-window risk: the file is republished every Tuesday per ASIC's help file (this copy: Monday 2026-09-14). A daysBack: 7 run executed on 2026-09-21 - i.e. right before the historically-typical refresh - matched zero companies in a real full-scan test, because the file's newest data (14 Sep) barely overlapped the 7-day lookback window measured from the run date (21 Sep). Widen daysBack, set an explicit dateFrom, or use allDates: true if a narrow window returns nothing.
• Default run bias: because the file is grouped by ACN (roughly, but not exactly, oldest-first) rather than by date, the default unfiltered run's first matches skew toward long-established companies (some over a century old) rather than recent registrations. Use a date filter (accepting the full-scan cost above) to get recent registrations specifically.
• Status mix (deduped company counts, 2026-09-21): REGD 3,721,706 (92.8%), DRGD 209,828 (5.2%), SOFF 46,789 (1.2%), EXAD 32,237 (0.8%), NOAC 295, CNCL 39, DISS 1.
• ABN coverage: 1,631,200 companies (40.7%) have no ABN on record (ASIC publishes 0; returned here as null).
• No documented rate limit: this is a single static file download, not a paginated API. fetchWithRetry retries transient network errors and 5xx/429s with backoff.

Use cases

• New-company lead lists: recently registered companies (accept the full-scan cost) filtered by name keyword or company type, for sales prospecting or supplier onboarding.
• KYC and compliance checks: confirm an ACN's status, registration date, ABN and full name history before dealing with a counterparty.
• Market and competitor research: track foreign company registrations (types: ["FNOS"]) or deregistrations/strike-offs (statuses: ["DRGD","SOFF"]) over time.

Support

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