The 100 Oldest Companies in Australia

The oldest company still on the Australian register is Westpac — registered on 8 April 1817 as the Bank of New South Wales, the country’s first bank.

The 100 oldest ACNs on the ASIC register, by registration date · Source: ASIC + the Australian Business Register · Updated September 2026

Every Australian company carries a registration date, and a handful reach back to the early 19th century — ASIC records them from the date the original entity was first established, long before the modern ACN system existed. The list below ranks the 100 companies with the earliest registration dates that are still on the register today, shown under their current name. Westpac, BHP, and a long line of colonial-era friendly societies, mutuals, banks and pastoral companies dominate the top of the table.

The 100 oldest companies in Australia

What the numbers say

• Banks, mutuals and friendly societies lead. The oldest survivors are overwhelmingly financial-services and community-benefit entities — the institutions that were incorporated first and had the longevity (and the assets) to keep going.
• Many now trade under a different name. A large share of the top 100 have rebranded over their long lives — Westpac began as the Bank of New South Wales; open any company to see its former names on its profile page.
• Registration date ≠ ACN. The nine-digit ACN was introduced in 1991, so these companies were assigned an ACN decades or a century after they were founded — the registration date, not the ACN, is what places them here.

Methodology

We take every company in the ASIC dataset with a valid registration date, keep those still on the register, and rank by the earliest date. Each company is shown under its current ASIC name (disambiguated against the ABR where ASIC flags more than one). Very early dates are ASIC’s own record of when the founding entity was established.

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Data: ASIC Companies dataset (CC BY 3.0 AU) cross-referenced with the Australian Business Register, both via data.gov.au. Analysis by Uplook — free to cite with a link to this page. A snapshot of the current register; this is general reference only, not the official record — see our disclaimer.