How to Register a .com.au: Eligibility (ABN/ACN) Explained

Registering a .com.au takes about ten minutes — but only if you arrive with the right paperwork and an eligible name. Arrive without them and you will hit a wall that .com registrants never see: the eligibility check. The .au namespace is one of the more tightly governed country codes in the world, and .com.au in particular requires you to prove a commercial connection to Australia and to the name itself.

I walk small business owners through this process all the time, and the same handful of questions come up every time. This guide answers them all: who is eligible, what the ABN and ACN requirements actually mean, which names you are allowed to register, and the step-by-step mechanics of getting it done.

Key takeaways

.com.au registration requires an Australian presence in a commercial capacity — in practice, an ABN, an ACN, or an Australian trade mark.

The domain name itself must match your entity’s name, be an acronym or abbreviation of it, or be closely and substantially connected to what you do.

Registration is through auDA-accredited registrars, not auDA itself; licences run from one to five years.

Keep your ABN details current — eligibility is not just a sign-up hurdle, it is a condition of holding the licence.

Who administers all this?

The .au namespace is administered by auDA (the .au Domain Administration), the not-for-profit body endorsed by the Australian Government to run Australia’s country-code domain. auDA sets the rules — consolidated in the .au Licensing Rules, in force since April 2021 — but does not sell domains. Registration happens through auDA-accredited registrars and their resellers, who check your eligibility at the point of sale.

Two pieces of vocabulary worth learning now, because every document you read will use them:

Registrant — you, the licence holder.
Registrar — the company you register through.

And one conceptual point that surprises people: you do not own a .au domain. You hold a licence to use it, for a period of one to five years at a time, conditional on remaining eligible and complying with auDA’s rules. In day-to-day life the distinction rarely matters, but it explains why eligibility can be re-checked and why a licence can be cancelled for breach.

The Australian presence requirement

Every .au registration requires an Australian presence. For .com.au (and .net.au), that presence must also be commercial. The qualifying routes that cover nearly everyone:

Route 1: an ABN

An Australian Business Number is the most common path. Sole traders, partnerships, trusts, and companies with an ABN all qualify. The ABN must be active — a cancelled ABN is a problem both at registration and at renewal time.

If you are a sole trader, the ABN is registered to you personally, and your .com.au eligibility travels with it. If you later incorporate, the domain licence should move to the company — that is a formal change of registrant, not just an admin tweak, so factor it into your incorporation to-do list.

Route 2: an ACN

Companies registered with ASIC have an Australian Company Number, and the company itself (which also invariably has an ABN) is an eligible registrant. For companies, register the domain in the company’s name — not a director’s personal name. Domains registered to a founder personally are one of the most common messes I untangle when businesses are sold or partners fall out.

Route 3: an Australian trade mark

An application for, or registration of, an Australian trade mark also satisfies the presence requirement — and it is the main route for foreign entities that want a .com.au. One important restriction applies to registrants relying solely on a trade mark: the domain name must be an exact match of the words in the trade mark. No abbreviations, no variations.

What does not qualify

Being an Australian citizen, on its own, does not make you eligible for .com.au — that is the key difference from .au direct, which individuals can register. Similarly, a business name registration with no underlying ABN, or an ABN belonging to a different entity than the one registering, will not pass the check. Registrars validate against the Australian Business Register (abr.gov.au), so make sure your records there are current before you start.

The name itself must be connected to you

Eligibility is only half the test. auDA’s allocation rules also require the domain name you choose to have a real relationship with you or your activities. For .com.au, the name must be one of:

An exact match of your company, business, or trading name — smithplumbing.com.au for Smith Plumbing Pty Ltd.
An acronym or abbreviation of it — spq.com.au for Smith Plumbing Queensland.
Closely and substantially connected to you, meaning the name refers to: a product you sell or service you provide, an event you sponsor or run, an activity you facilitate, premises you operate from, or a profession you practise. This is the flexible category — it is what lets Smith Plumbing legitimately register blockeddrains.com.au or hotwaterrepairs.com.au.

In practice, registrars ask you to nominate your eligibility basis from a dropdown during checkout. Most registrations sail through automatically. But the connection requirement has teeth: a registration that plainly fails it can be challenged through auDA’s complaints process and cancelled. If you are registering a name with no obvious link to your ABN’s recorded activities, be ready to explain the connection.

A note on warehousing

auDA’s rules prohibit registering a .com.au purely for resale with no connection to your business (often called warehousing). Domain investing in the .au space operates within the connection rules — investors typically rely on genuine connections such as developing the name into a content or service site. If your plan is “register fifty names and flip them”, understand the rules you are operating under first; the .au space is not the free-for-all that .com is.

Step-by-step: registering your .com.au

With eligibility sorted, the mechanics are straightforward.

Step 1: Get your records straight

Before anything else, look up your own ABN on abr.gov.au. Confirm it is active, the entity name is right, and — if you trade under a different name — that the business name is registered with ASIC and linked to the ABN. Five minutes here prevents the most common registration failure.

Step 2: Check availability

Search the name at any registrar, and check the official auDA WHOIS (whois.auda.org.au) to see whether a name is registered and when its licence ends. While you are there, check the matching .au direct and consider whether you want both — our .au Domain Chooser can help you decide in two minutes.

Step 3: Choose a registrar

Any auDA-accredited registrar can sell you the identical domain — the differences are price (especially renewal price, not the first-year promo), renewal reminders, DNS management, and support. We cover how to compare properly in choosing a .au registrar. Resist the default of bundling the domain with whoever builds your website: keeping the domain in an account you control, separate from your web developer, preserves your leverage if that relationship ever sours.

Step 4: Register — carefully

At checkout you will be asked for:

Registrant entity details — the exact legal entity name and its ABN or ACN. This is the licence holder. Get this right; fixing a wrong registrant later is a formal process.
Eligibility basis — which rule you qualify under (ABN, ACN, trade mark) and the connection type.
Contact details — the registrant email here is the key to the kingdom: renewal notices, transfer approvals, and password resets all flow to it. Use a role address you will still read in five years (admin@ or the owner’s personal address), never an employee’s individual mailbox and never an address on the domain you are registering as your only contact — if the domain ever lapses, that mailbox dies exactly when you need it.
Licence period — one to five years. For an operating business, longer is safer; renewal failure is the number-one way good domains are lost, as our expiry and drop-catching guide shows in painful detail.

Indicative cost: most registrars sit somewhere around $10–$30 per year for a .com.au, with the exact figure varying by registrar and term. Check the renewal price before you fall for a first-year special.

Step 5: Lock it down after registration

Turn on two-factor authentication on the registrar account.
Add a second contact email on a different domain.
Set a calendar reminder for renewal, independent of the registrar’s emails.
Configure your DNS (or delegate it to your host) and set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records before you start sending email on the domain.

Staying eligible: the part people forget

Eligibility is a continuing condition of your licence, not a one-time gate. The situations that catch businesses out:

Cancelling an ABN. Wind up the sole-trader ABN when you incorporate, and the domain licensed against it is no longer properly held — move the licence to the new entity promptly via a change of registrant.
Selling the business. The domain licence does not automatically follow the business assets; it must be formally transferred to the buyer’s eligible entity.
Letting registrant details rot. auDA rules require registrant contact information to be accurate. A domain whose registrant email points at a dead mailbox is a domain whose renewal notices are going nowhere.

A ten-minute annual review — ABN active, registrant entity correct, contact email alive, renewal date known — is all it takes.

A worked example

To make the rules concrete, meet a fictional composite of a hundred real clients: Priya, a Brisbane electrician going out on her own as “Sparq Electrical”.

She applies for an ABN as a sole trader, and registers “Sparq Electrical” as a business name with ASIC, linked to that ABN. (Cost so far: the business name fee; ABNs are free.)
She searches availability: sparqelectrical.com.au is free, and so is sparq.au. She decides to register both — the .com.au as her primary for the website and email, the .au direct as a defensive hold that redirects.
At checkout she selects her eligibility: sole trader, ABN supplied, name an exact match of her registered business name. The registrar validates the ABN against the ABR automatically.
She registers for three years, pays an amount comfortably inside the indicative $10–$30 per year range for each name, uses her long-standing personal Gmail as the registrant contact (not [email protected] — that mailbox does not exist yet, and should never be the only contact anyway), and turns on two-factor authentication and auto-renew.
Twelve months later she incorporates as Sparq Electrical Pty Ltd. The domains move to the company by a formal change of registrant, the old sole-trader ABN is cancelled after the transfer completes, and the renewal calendar entry is updated with the new entity’s details.

Total administrative time across the whole story: perhaps an hour. The order of operations — entity first, records straight, domain registered to the right holder, contacts that outlive any single mailbox — is the entire trick.

Common questions

Can I register a .com.au before my business launches? Yes, once you have the ABN. Many people get the ABN, register the domain, and build the business behind it — that is a perfectly normal sequence.

Can I hold a .com.au with a foreign company? Only via the Australian trade mark route (with the exact-match restriction), or by establishing an Australian entity.

How many .com.au domains can one ABN hold? There is no numerical cap — each name just has to independently satisfy the allocation rules.

Is .net.au any different? Eligibility is essentially the same as .com.au. It is a fine fallback when the .com.au is taken, though it carries less consumer recognition.

The eligibility system is the price of .com.au’s credibility: because every registrant has had to show a verifiable Australian commercial connection, the ending retains a trust that wide-open namespaces lack. Do the paperwork once, do it in the right entity’s name, and that credibility works for you for as long as you keep renewing.

Rules summarised from auDA’s .au Licensing Rules — always check the current version at auda.org.au, as requirements can change.