Overall, there were 2,589,873 actively trading businesses in Australia as of 30 June 2023.

To put that into perspective, there's just shy of one Australian business for every 10 people in the country.

In FY 2022/23 there was a 0.8% increase in the number of businesses operating compared to the previous year, or 19,973 extra businesses. That rate of growth has fallen from the year before, when it was +7%, or 167,646 extra businesses.

Here's how the number of businesses has changed over the years...

And here's the total broken down by type of business.

The company structure dominates (42%), followed by sole proprietors (30%), trusts (19%), then partnerships (9%).

The remainder (only 393) are public sector businesses.

Of course, some sectors of the economy can weather turbulence better than others.

Let's look at the current industry-by-industry business number breakdown.

Construction remains Australia's largest industry by number of businesses operating.

Although it contracted by 0.1% (-392 businesses) in 2022-23.

Health care and social assistance (+6.1%), financial and insurance services (+2.7%), and transport, postal and warehousing (+2.4%) were the sectors with the biggest growth last year in terms of the number of businesses operating.

Administrative and support services (-1.6%) and retail trade (-1.4%) saw the largest relative decline.

And here are largest industries by number of employees.

The traditional industries dominate here too, with healthcare, social assistance, and retail combined making up almost 24% of Australia's workforce.

The survival rate of new businesses varies a lot between industries.

On one end of the scale, just under 64% of agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses survived beyond three years of operating (among businesses started in the 2018/19 financial year).

At the other end, only 35.6% of transport, postal and warehousing businesses survived over the same time frame.

The overall survival rate across all industries was 50.8%.

According to Dr Chatterjee, the continuing recovery from the pandemic and international factors have been be key to determining which industries survive and thrive in 2023.

“Travel and education exports have once again become important for the Australian economy”, she said.

But there are challenges for some sectors, like building and construction, according to Yanir Yakutiel, CEO of business lender, Lumi.

"Continued RBA rate increases have put further pressure on house prices and development, with lead contractors on fixed contracts particularly exposed," he said.

But Yakutiel echoed the optimism for the tourism and education sectors, as well as the related hospitality and services industries.

"They still have much further to bounce back from pre-pandemic levels as tourists and overseas students return to Australia and normal consumption levels resume", he said.

The Australian Capital Territory had the biggest percentage growth in businesses operating in 2022-23.

Its 3.5% growth rate was more than three times that of New South Wales (5.5%), although NSW remains the state with the highest total number of businesses (870,916).

Victoria was the only state to record a decline in the number of businesses operating, with 7,607 fewer businesses operating compared to the previous year (-1%).

Victoria also had the highest number of businesses moving to a different state (-1,345), while Queensland had the highest inward business migration (+1,782).

Looking at the number of businesses per head of population, New South Wales has the highest at 0.11 businesses per person. Tasmania has the lowest at 0.06.

The Northern Territory has the lowest business survival rate. Less than half (48.2%) of business there lasted beyond three years. Tasmanian businesses had the best survival rate — 54.7% of businesses there lasted beyond three years.

The business sector in Australia is dominated by SMEs (small and medium enterprises).

In fact, 97.3% of all business in Australia (or around 2.5 million) are small businesses (0-19 employees) and a further 2.5% are medium businesses (64,559), employing 20-199 employees.

Among the population of small businesses, 62.9% do not have any employees, 27.9% employ between 1-4 people and 9.2% employ between 5-19 people.

The remaining 0.2% of businesses in Australia have more than 200 employees.

But overall, large businesses employ more people (4.202 million) than any other type of business.

Mining was again comfortably Australia's largest industry by earnings ($220.32 billion in 2021-22), growing by more than 32% compared to the previous year.

Each of the other highest-earning industries grew their income in 2021-22, with the exception of construction which declined by more than $5 billion (-9.3%).

What about the least profitable industries?

Air and space transport, motion picture and sound recording, and water transport were the only sectors recording negative profit margins in 2021-22.

Private hospitals as a sector has one of the lowest overall profit margins, as well as being the sector with the highest proportions of loss-making businesses.

New lending has been predominantly at variable rates. Just over 86% of outstanding business finance as at June 2023 was on a variable rate, compared to just under 85% a year previously.

The proportion of business finance that's on a variable rate has been creeping up steadily since July 2019 (the earliest records published by the RBA) when it was just over 78%.

Interest rates on business lending have risen steeply since May 2022 when the Reserve Bank of Australia began lifting the official cash rate.

The rate of increase has tapered somewhat, but is still heading north as the lagging impact of tighter central bank monetary policy is still being felt.