The Most Common Surnames in Australia

The most common surname in Australia among people who have run their own business is Singh.

Ranked from the full catalogue of 11.1 million sole-trader ABNs (active + cancelled) · Source: Australian Business Register · Updated September 2026

Across every Australian who has registered as a sole trader — 11.1 million ABNs in all — the most common surname is Singh (95,254 registrations, 0.86%), ahead of Smith (67,681, 0.61%). Widening the lens to the whole history of the register, rather than only businesses trading today, pulls the Anglo-Celtic classics — Smith, Williams, Jones, Brown, Taylor, Wilson — up the table, because the cancelled ABNs skew to earlier decades. Even so, Singh still leads, and South Asian names (Singh, Kaur, Patel, Kumar, Sharma, Khan) and East Asian names (Lee, Wang, Chen, Li, Zhang, Liu) remain far more prominent here than in a general Australian surname ranking.

The 50 most common sole-trader surnames in Australia

	Surname	Sole traders	Share
1	Singh	95,254	0.86%
2	Smith	67,681	0.61%
3	Kaur	42,860	0.39%
4	Nguyen	39,476	0.36%
5	Lee	36,192	0.33%
6	Williams	35,245	0.32%
7	Jones	35,054	0.32%
8	Patel	34,835	0.31%
9	Brown	33,689	0.30%
10	Wang	31,493	0.28%
11	Taylor	29,677	0.27%
12	Wilson	29,568	0.27%
13	Chen	29,395	0.27%
14	Li	28,745	0.26%
15	Zhang	25,804	0.23%
16	Liu	21,500	0.19%
17	Johnson	21,131	0.19%
18	Martin	20,535	0.19%
19	Kim	20,393	0.18%
20	Thomas	19,731	0.18%
21	White	19,295	0.17%
22	Anderson	19,277	0.17%
23	Thompson	18,929	0.17%
24	Kumar	17,252	0.16%
25	Tran	17,099	0.15%
26	Walker	17,009	0.15%
27	Kelly	16,821	0.15%
28	King	16,556	0.15%
29	Sharma	16,341	0.15%
30	Harris	16,187	0.15%
31	Robinson	16,039	0.14%
32	Ryan	16,013	0.14%
33	Campbell	15,952	0.14%
34	Davis	15,557	0.14%
35	Roberts	15,465	0.14%
36	Edwards	15,256	0.14%
37	Hall	15,094	0.14%
38	Wright	15,085	0.14%
39	Evans	14,995	0.14%
40	Young	14,819	0.13%
41	Scott	14,497	0.13%
42	Moore	14,484	0.13%
43	Miller	14,302	0.13%
44	Clark	13,932	0.13%
45	Huang	13,795	0.12%
46	Murphy	13,706	0.12%
47	Khan	13,698	0.12%
48	Yang	13,663	0.12%
49	Clarke	13,612	0.12%
50	Mitchell	13,562	0.12%

What the numbers say

Singh leads — but the gap narrows across history. At 0.86% Singh is about 1.4× Smith (0.61%); among active sole traders only, Singh’s lead over Smith is more than 3×, so the newer the cohort, the further ahead Singh runs.
An enormous long tail. The 11.1 million surnames span 751,336 distinct family names; the top ten together make up just 4.1%.
Kaur at #3. Kaur and Singh are traditionally given to Sikh women and men — their combined presence near the top marks one of the country’s most entrepreneurial communities by this measure.

Methodology

The Australian Business Register’s bulk extract lists every ABN ever issued. We use the entire catalogue of ABNs registered as an Individual/Sole Trader — people trading under their own legal name — both active and cancelled: 11,095,506 sole-trader ABNs in all. Taking the full history (rather than only the ~4.3 million currently active) gives the broadest possible sample, spanning everyone who has registered as a sole trader across the life of the register. Companies, trusts, partnerships and super funds are excluded because their names aren’t personal names.

ABR stores each name as one uppercase string in first-to-last order (e.g. MATTHEW JOHN HICKEY). We took the last whitespace-separated token as the surname. Records with only one token, or whose relevant token was a single-letter initial or non-alphabetic, were skipped, leaving about 11.06 million valid names. Particled surnames (VAN DER BERG, DE SOUZA) are counted on their final token only, so they’re slightly under-represented; the register carries no ethnicity field, so any demographic reading above is inferred from the names themselves. Counts are of ABN registrations, not distinct people — a person who has held more than one ABN is counted each time.

See the most common first names → · Search any Australian business, ABN or name →

Data: Australian Business Register (ABN bulk extract), © Commonwealth of Australia, licensed CC BY, via data.gov.au. Analysis by Uplook — free to cite with a link to this page. Figures are a snapshot and shift as ABNs are registered and cancelled. This is general reference only, not the official register — see our disclaimer.