Australian Website Statistics 2026: Domains, Design & Online Behaviour

Australian businesses bought 63,419 new .au domains in March 2026, a 20.9% jump on the same month a year earlier. It isn’t the biggest month on record, though. November 2025 was bigger still, with 65,586 new registrations (+25.5% year-on-year). Two surge months in five, with the months in between sitting at or above their historical baseline. The kind of acceleration that doesn’t usually show up in a market the rest of the world treats as mature.

The number comes from .au Domain Administration’s monthly registry report, which is the most reliable source for what’s actually happening in the Australian web. It’s also one of the most-ignored datasets in our industry’s marketing content, which is strange given how much it tells you. Every line in those reports is a small business, a side hustle, a new agency, or a brand that decided in 2026 that it needed a website.

We pulled this together because we kept getting the same questions from clients in Sydney and around the country: how many Australians are actually online, what’s happening with .au domains, what mobile use looks like now, and where small businesses fit in. The article draws on the auDA registry data, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Australia, the auDA Digital Lives of Australians study, and a handful of other primary sources. Every figure is dated to when it was actually collected, not just when someone wrote about it.

The headline numbers

• 4,336,499 total .au domain names under management as of 31 March 2026, up 1.8% year-on-year (auDA Registry Stats, March 2026)
• 63,419 new .au domains registered in March 2026 alone, a 20.9% jump on March 2025 (auDA)
• 3,248,234 .com.au names, still the dominant namespace, accounting for around 75% of all .au registrations (auDA, March 2026)
• 797,892 direct .au names (the namespace launched in March 2022), growing faster than any other extension at 3.2% YoY (auDA)
• 2,729,648 actively trading businesses in the Australian economy as of 30 June 2025 (ABS Counts of Australian Businesses)
• 26.2 million Australians use the internet, about 97.1% of the population (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Australia, published October 2025)
• 41 hours and 3 minutes is the average weekly time an Australian internet user spends online (DataReportal, late 2025)

How many .au domains are actually out there

The .au namespace reached 4 million names under management in late 2023 and has continued to grow modestly since. The March 2026 figure of 4,336,499 is the highest auDA has ever published. Year-on-year growth at the total namespace level is 1.8%, which sounds slow until you remember that almost every Australian business that’s going to have a website already has one, so growth is now driven by new business formation, multi-domain strategies, and uptake of the newer .au direct extension.

What’s more interesting is the gross flow of new registrations. auDA’s 2024-25 Annual Report Summary put the average at around 50,400 new registrations per month across that financial year. Through the second half of 2025, monthly figures ran a touch above that baseline, then November spiked to 65,586. December dropped sharply to 47,338. January and February returned to the mid-50s thousands, and March 2026 spiked again to 63,419.

Two surge months in five, both more than 20% above the long-run average. Not the kind of pattern you’d expect in a market that’s supposed to be done growing.

A single month doesn’t make a trend, and seasonality matters (March is often a strong registration month as businesses set up before the end of the financial year). But two surge months in five aren’t easily explained by seasonality alone. Something in the underlying market activity is running hotter than the historical baseline.

Namespace breakdown: March 2026 vs March 2023

Extension	Mar 2023	Mar 2024	Mar 2025	Mar 2026	YoY
com.au	3,133,853	3,168,114	3,186,859	3,248,234	+1.9%
.au direct	747,971	766,787	772,968	797,892	+3.2%
net.au	216,755	204,988	192,265	182,207	-5.2%
org.au	73,876	70,795	69,587	69,626	+0.1%
edu.au	17,435	17,472	17,437	17,450	+0.07%
id.au	12,767	12,229	11,985	11,998	+0.1%
gov.au	6,280	6,422	6,570	6,616	+0.7%
asn.au	3,086	2,861	2,686	2,590	-3.6%

Source: .au Domain Administration, Registry Monthly Statistics, March 2026.

A few patterns worth flagging from that table:

.com.au is gaining about 60,000 net names a year and remains the default for any Australian business that wants to be taken seriously. The gap between .com.au and every other extension is enormous and isn’t closing.

.net.au has been quietly dying for half a decade. It lost more than 34,000 names between March 2023 and March 2026, a 16% contraction. The original logic for .net.au (networks, ISPs, technology businesses) has dissolved as those businesses moved to .com.au or .com. If you’re maintaining a .net.au and your stakeholders ever ask whether it still does anything for the brand, the answer in 2026 is mostly no, except to the extent it forwards traffic.

.org.au and .edu.au are essentially flat, which makes sense given the eligibility rules tying them to specific organisation types.

.id.au remains tiny at just under 12,000 names, an interesting failure of a personal-identity namespace in a country of 27 million people.

The .au direct experiment, four years on

The .au direct namespace (short, punchy domains like brand.au without the .com in the middle) opened to the public on 24 March 2022. The launch was contentious. Existing .com.au holders had a 6-month priority window to claim the matching .au domain, after which names became available on a first-come, first-served basis. Plenty of trademark disputes followed.

Four years on, the numbers tell a more measured story than either side predicted at the time:

• 797,892 direct .au names registered as of March 2026
• That’s up from 747,971 three years ago, a 6.7% rise over the period
• Growth has been steady but unspectacular: roughly 17,000 to 25,000 net new names per year
• It’s growing faster (in percentage terms) than .com.au, but from a much smaller base

797,892 .au direct registrations four years after launch. Steady growth, not the boom or the collapse either side predicted at the time.

The doom predictions (that .au direct would cannibalise .com.au, fragment Australian search results, or collapse under squatter abuse) haven’t really come true. The predictions of .au supremacy that .com.au would be replaced within a few years haven’t come true either. What’s happened instead is that .au direct has carved out a complementary niche: short, brandable, often used as a redirect to a primary .com.au, occasionally used as the primary for tech-leaning brands and startups.

For a web design or branding conversation in 2026, the practical position is that .au is worth registering as a defensive measure even if you primarily use .com.au. Twelve to fifteen dollars a year is cheap insurance against a competitor claiming the matching name.

How long Australians register their domains for

Buried in the same auDA monthly report is one of the more useful pieces of data for any business advising clients on domain strategy: the breakdown of registration durations.

In March 2026, of the new and renewed registrations:

• 199,892 were one-year registrations (about 73%)
• 53,097 were two-year (19%)
• 13,524 were three-year (5%)
• 1,006 were four-year (under 1%)
• 7,251 were five-year (about 3%)

73% of .au registrations are on annual renewal. Five-year registrations are just 3% of the market.

Three-quarters of the market is on annual renewal. That’s a big number, and it’s the source of more domain expiry incidents than any agency wants to admit. Domains lapse, ownership records get out of date, the credit card on file expires, and the IT person who registered the domain leaves the company. Any web design or hosting agency that doesn’t do active domain monitoring as part of its retainer is leaving a real risk on the table for clients, and a real revenue stream untouched.

The five-year tail is also interesting. Fewer than 1 in 30 registrations is for the maximum 5-year term, even though the per-year cost typically drops with longer registration terms. Most businesses are choosing flexibility over the small savings, which says something about how Australian businesses think about commitment to their digital footprint.

Internet usage across Australia in 2026

Zooming out from domains: who’s actually using the Australian internet, and how?

The Digital 2026 Australia report (published in October 2025 with data current through late 2025) puts internet penetration at 97.1% of the population, among the highest national rates in the world. There were 26.2 million internet users in Australia at the time of publication, with annual growth of about 1%, adding around 252,000 new users in the previous twelve months. That growth is mostly demographic (population increase and the very small remaining rump of non-users coming online) rather than market expansion.

Australians spend an average of 41 hours and 3 minutes per week online. That’s roughly five hours and 52 minutes a day, every day. It’s more time than most full-time employees spend at their desks doing focused work. Whatever your business does, that’s the attention environment you’re competing in.

41 hours and 3 minutes online per week. The average Australian internet user spends more time on the web than the average employee spends at their desk doing focused work.

Mobile connectivity is at 34.1 million cellular connections, which is 126% of the population, because many Australians have a phone, a tablet, a work phone, or a smartwatch on a mobile plan. Median mobile download speeds reached 122.20 Mbps by late 2025, up nearly 25% in twelve months on Ookla’s measurement. Median fixed download speeds were lower at 95.29 Mbps but growing faster, up 32.6% in the same window. The mobile-fixed speed gap that defined the early NBN years has closed for everyday browsing, but fixed connections still win for large file transfers, video calls with multiple participants, and the kind of high-throughput tasks creative professionals do.

The Digital Lives of Australians 2025 study found that 64% of working Australians say they can’t do their job without the internet, up from 58% in 2021. For small businesses, the figure is 51%, up from 44% over the same four years. The dependency curve has steepened, which means downtime, slow load times, and broken websites cost real revenue in a way that wasn’t quite as true even a few years ago.

Mobile versus desktop, and why design briefs still get this wrong

Mobile overtook desktop as the primary device for internet access in Australia in 2021, and the share has held since. According to figures cited from the Digital 2026 Australia report, 95.7% of Australian internet users access the web from a smartphone, while 74.1% still use a laptop or desktop at least some of the time. Most people use both, and they’re not exclusive categories.

The honest reading of the device data is more nuanced than ‘mobile-first’. Mobile dominates time spent and casual browsing. Desktop still dominates commercial transactions, considered purchases, and the kind of detailed research that drives B2B leads. Globally, mobile devices (excluding tablets) accounted for around 62% of total web pageviews in 2026, according to StatCounter, but that ratio varies widely by sector. A tradie’s website might see 80% mobile traffic, while a wholesale B2B catalogue might see 65% desktop.

What’s changed since the early mobile-first years is the average size and resolution of mobile devices. The iPhone 12 mini is a museum piece. Most Australians browse on phones with screens between 6.1 and 6.7 inches and resolutions higher than the laptops most agencies were designing for in 2015. ‘Mobile’ no longer means ‘tiny screen with a thumb’. It means ‘a high-resolution device held in one hand by someone whose attention you have for about 12 seconds’.

For a web design brief in 2026, the meaningful questions are no longer ‘Are we doing responsive?’ (you are, that’s table stakes) but:

• What is the actual mobile-desktop split for this client’s audience, by behaviour, not just by traffic?
• What are the device pixel ratio and viewport distribution in the analytics?
• Are desktop conversions paying for the desktop design hours, or is the mobile experience genuinely doing the heavy commercial lifting?

Most clients can’t answer these without their analytics in front of them, which is itself a discovery-phase conversation worth having.

Small business online: the gap that hasn’t closed

This is the section most marketing-stats articles don’t bother with, and it’s the one most relevant if you’re selling websites for a living, which we are.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’s most recent Characteristics of Australian Business release (covering the year ended 30 June 2022) found that 30% of Australian businesses received online orders during the period. Of those, 20% received orders through their own website or app, and 12% through a third-party platform like Amazon, eBay, Uber Eats, or a marketplace. The figures overlap because some businesses use both.

Older ABS data from the IT Use surveys consistently showed that around a third of microbusinesses (those with 0-4 employees) had no web presence. The most recent figures available from those surveys put microbusiness web presence in the mid-30% range, well below the 86% and 98% rates seen in larger SMEs and enterprises.

There are 2,729,648 actively trading businesses in Australia as of June 2025, according to ABS Counts of Australian Businesses. Of those, only 994,178 are employing businesses; the rest are sole traders and non-employing entities. If even half of the 1.7 million non-employing businesses don’t have a proper website (or have a half-finished Wix page nobody updates), the addressable market for an Australian web design agency is several hundred thousand businesses. That gap explains many of the new domain registrations appearing in the auDA monthly reports.

51% of small businesses say they can’t operate without the internet. Most still treat their websites as brochures.

The Digital Lives 2025 study added some texture to this: 51% of small businesses say they can’t operate without the internet (up from 44% in 2021), but only a fraction of them treat their website as a serious commercial asset. Most still see it as a brochure. From our work with Sydney businesses, this is the gap that matters most: moving clients from ‘we have a website because we have to’ to ‘our website does specific commercial work’.

What the data actually means if you’re commissioning a website in 2026

A few practical observations from the numbers above, written for the people who’ll have to act on them:

Register .au alongside .com.au. The 6.7% three-year growth in .au direct shows it’s becoming a genuine secondary namespace. Holding both costs almost nothing and removes a future risk.

Don’t accept a one-year domain registration as default. Three-year registrations are 5% of the market. They should be 30%. Domain expiry is one of the most preventable causes of business website downtime, and a longer registration removes one renewal moment of failure.

Audit your hosting and platform every two to three years. Australian fixed broadband speeds increased by 32.6% over 12 months. Mobile is up 25%. The performance baseline users now experience on every other site is materially higher than it was when most websites built before 2024 were specced. Sites that were ‘reasonably fast’ in 2023 feel slow in 2026, and Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds reflect that.

Stop calling it ‘mobile-first’ in client briefs. The split is more interesting than that. Pull the actual device data for the client, examine where conversions occur, and design accordingly. A 70% mobile traffic site with 65% of revenue from desktop needs both experiences to be taken seriously.

Treat the website as commercial infrastructure, not a brochure. The auDA data suggests that Australian small businesses are increasingly dependent on the internet to operate, but the ABS data suggests that most still don’t use their websites as a transactional channel. The agencies that will grow over the next few years are the ones that close that gap for clients, turning brochures into booking systems, lead funnels, e-commerce platforms, and customer portals.

Methodology and updates

All statistics on this page are linked to a primary source (the inline links above) and date-stamped to the period in which the data were actually collected, not just the year it was published. Where a figure is an estimate or a calculation derived from primary data, we’ve said so.

Sources used in this article: auDA monthly registry statistics (March 2026 and October 2025 reports), the auDA 2024-25 Annual Report Summary, the Digital Lives of Australians 2025 study, DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Australia report (in partnership with Meltwater and We Are Social), the ABS Counts of Australian Businesses release (July 2021 to June 2025), the ABS Characteristics of Australian Business 2021-22 release, StatCounter Global Stats, and the Ookla Speedtest Global Index.

We update this article each month after auDA publishes the latest registry stats (usually around the 20th of the following month). The annual sources (DataReportal, ABS, Digital Lives) are refreshed when their next releases are published. If you spot a figure that looks wrong or outdated, let us know.

About Keen To Design

Keen To Design is a Sydney web design agency. We work with Australian businesses to build websites that convert, not just look good. This page is refreshed when auDA publishes new monthly registry stats and when the major ABS releases land.