StandardsDesk: Australian small-business expense benchmarks
Source: Australian Taxation Office for the Commonwealth of Australia, 2023–24 small business benchmarks; industry pages updated 16 March 2026, accessed 20 October 2026.
The 177-row results file preserves all published ratio/average cells from ten selected industry pages and their original three annual turnover bands (30 industry-band combinations). It is not a sample of 177 businesses. No business counts by band were supplied in these pages.
Ratios use annual turnover excluding GST and the ATO tax-return definitions. Total expenses and labour subtract payments to associated persons. Cost of sales excludes salary/wages. Missing expense categories are unpublished, not zero. Average ratios are published means, not range midpoints. Ranges cover the ATO-defined population around the mean; they are not industry minima/maxima or confidence intervals.
The scenario file has 20 rows: ten industries at each illustrative turnover of AUD350000 and AUD750000. Select the published band containing turnover, then multiply its rounded ratio by turnover/100. These are calculations, not observed annual bills, forecasts, profits, achievable savings or causal growth estimates. No weighting, interpolation or imputation.
Turnover limits shown in the source are preserved. For machine filtering, More than X is stored with minimum X+1 and empty maximum; whole AUD inputs are used. This convention does not assert treatment of fractional-dollar turnover. An empty band maximum does not remove the ATO population-level exclusion of turnover above AUD15000000.
The total expense complement is deliberately not exported as net profit. Selected component ratios should not be summed into a synthetic low/high-cost business; populations and reporting differ and not all expense categories are separately published.
Each row includes its original source URL, update/access dates, label and raw published value. The reader article and calculation scripts explain the selected comparison. Separate sector views are not pooled into a national estimate.
ATO material is attributed and adapted under its website copyright permission: https://www.ato.gov.au/about-ato/using-our-website/copyright-notice . No endorsement by the ATO or Commonwealth is implied. StandardsDesk is responsible for its selection and calculations.