Room to Grow: Small Business in New South Wales

New South Wales has 916,603 actively trading businesses. Of those, 893,421 — 97.5 per cent — employ fewer than twenty people, and 560,636 employ nobody but the person who owns them (ABS, 2025b). Between them, small businesses employ around 1.7 million people, roughly 43 per cent of the state’s private sector workforce, pay $77.4 billion a year in wages and salaries, and earn $550.3 billion in sales and service income (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). They are not a sector. They are the ordinary economic life of the state.

The Australian Democrats come at this from the liberal tradition: a belief that enterprise is a form of freedom, that competition serves consumers better than incumbency, that people who take a risk with their own money deserve rules that are clear and a state that pays its bills. That tradition also insists on honesty about trade-offs. Not every rule is red tape. Not every deregulation is a saving. The test we apply is whether a requirement earns its cost — and whether anyone is measuring.

On the current evidence, too much of what New South Wales asks of small business has never had to pass that test. Red tape is now the fastest-growing concern small businesses report, named by 77 per cent of them at the end of 2025 — a record high in the Commission’s survey series (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). Across Australia in 2024–25, 45,577 non-employing businesses took on at least one employee, while 78,005 employing businesses shed their last one (ABS, 2025a). That is the number that should worry a government.

Our platform underscores our commitment to the following five points:

1. Make it easier to hire the first employee: We’ll press for state settings — payroll tax thresholds, licensing, insurance and paperwork — to be judged on whether they help a sole trader become an employer, because that is the transition on which the state’s job growth actually depends.
2. Make government pay its own bills, and pay for being late: We’ll argue that when the New South Wales Government or a large business is slow to pay a small supplier, it is borrowing from that supplier without asking — and that interest should be automatic, not discretionary.
3. Count the cost of regulation the way we count the cost of anything else: We’ll call for a published, measured target for reducing the compliance and delay costs of New South Wales regulation, an annual independent report on whether it is falling, and a small business impact test on every new rule. Measured, published, and honest about what the rules buy us.
4. Fix the taxes that punish growth rather than the taxes that fund the state: We’ll advocate for indexing the payroll tax threshold, cleaning up the contractor and employment agent provisions that catch arrangements they were never designed for, and simplifying rather than merely reducing.
5. Open the market to newcomers: We’ll back the removal of unjustified occupational licence barriers, the ban on non-compete clauses for low- and middle-income workers, free access to standards the law makes compulsory, and procurement that a firm of five people can actually win.

The Australian Democrats want a different conversation about small business in New South Wales — one that stops treating it as a constituency to be reassured and starts treating it as the productive core of the state’s economy. Enterprise policy done properly is not about grants and announcements. It is about whether the rules are clear, whether the bills get paid, whether the tax system punishes the act of hiring, and whether a newcomer can enter a market an incumbent would rather keep closed. What follows are directions we want debated, not a manifesto we ask anyone to swallow whole.

The shape of small business in New South Wales

At 30 June 2025 there were 916,603 actively trading businesses in New South Wales, up 20,040 over the year — the largest net increase of any state or territory — on an entry rate of 16.5 per cent and an exit rate of 14.1 per cent (ABS, 2025a). Within that total, 560,636 businesses employed nobody, 257,933 employed one to four people, 74,852 employed five to nineteen, 21,289 employed twenty to 199, and 1,953 employed 200 or more (ABS, 2025b). Businesses with fewer than twenty employees therefore make up 893,421 of them, or 97.5 per cent — a figure that matches the 893,000 the state’s own Small Business Commission uses (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). Nationally the picture is the same: 2,656,469 small businesses, 97.3 per cent of all Australian businesses, of which around 64 per cent are non-employing (ASBFEO, 2025a).

The economic weight of these firms is not marginal. New South Wales small businesses employ around 1.7 million people in the private sector — roughly 43 per cent of the state’s private sector workforce — pay $77.4 billion a year in wages and salaries and generate $550.3 billion in annual sales and service income (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). Nationally, small businesses employed 5,165,000 people in 2023–24, 39 per cent of the private sector workforce measured across the industries the ABS publishes, with construction (804,000), professional, scientific and technical services (627,000) and accommodation and food services (486,000) the largest small business employers (ASBFEO, 2025b).

Turnover tells you what kind of businesses these mostly are. At June 2024, 644,604 Australian businesses turned over less than $50,000 a year and 864,086 turned over between $50,000 and $200,000 — together more than half of all businesses — while 931,592 sat between $200,000 and $2 million (ASBFEO, 2025a). This is the scale at which a $500 standard, a $13,000 qualification or a sixty-day invoice is not an inconvenience but a decision about whether to keep trading.

Survival is not assured. Of the 817,749 businesses operating in New South Wales in June 2021, 514,567 were still trading four years later — a survival rate of 62.9 per cent. Of the 143,455 that entered in 2021–22, just 68,320 survived to June 2025: 47.6 per cent (ABS, 2025a). Roughly half of new New South Wales businesses do not see their fourth birthday. That is not, in itself, a policy failure — churn is how a market economy reallocates effort. It does mean that the compounding cost of getting the settings wrong is paid by an enormous number of people in a short space of time.

The vanishing employer

The most consequential statistic in Australian small business data is one almost nobody quotes. The ABS tracks how surviving businesses move between employment size categories. In 2024–25, 45,577 surviving non-employing businesses took on at least one employee. In the same year, 78,005 surviving businesses that had employed someone shed all their staff and became non-employing — 67,040 of them firms that had employed one to four people, 8,691 that had employed five to nineteen, and 2,238 that had employed twenty to 199. The net movement was 32,428 businesses out of the employing population (ABS, 2025a).

The Ombudsman’s own reading of the earlier year is blunter still: only three per cent of surviving self-employed businesses became an employing business in 2023–24, “the lowest rate since these records began in 2007–08” (ASBFEO, 2025b). The 2024–25 data implies a similar rate of about 3.3 per cent. The Ombudsman attributes the pattern to a tight labour market, difficulty accessing suitably qualified staff, “hesitations around increasing and more complex employer responsibilities”, and growing interest in engaging contractors instead (ASBFEO, 2025b). Consistent with that, the number of people employed by businesses with five to nineteen employees fell 6.1 per cent in 2023–24 — the only size band to fall — while employment in large businesses rose 6.2 per cent (ASBFEO, 2025b).

This is the transition that state policy most directly touches, because the step from sole trader to employer is where payroll tax, workers compensation, licensing, industrial obligations and record-keeping all arrive at once. It is also the transition that the state has the least visibility over. We think New South Wales should publish an annual account of it: how many state businesses took on a first employee, how many stopped employing, and what changed.

What compliance costs, and how to count it honestly

The Productivity Commission’s December 2025 inquiry report is the most careful recent treatment of this question, and it is careful in both directions. It finds that “fewer firms are entering and exiting markets; fewer are innovating and reaching the productivity frontier; and labour is more slowly reallocating to its most productive use”, and that non-mining business investment is down 3.0 percentage points as a share of GDP since the global financial crisis (Productivity Commission, 2025b). Its remedy is institutional rather than rhetorical: a whole-of-government commitment to reduce the compliance and delay costs of Commonwealth regulation by $10 billion by 2030; an annual independent Regulation Review reporting on a broad set of indicators of regulatory quality and burden; “regulatory burden offsetting” so that portfolios and regulators do not increase net compliance and delay costs; and an independent statutory commissioner to oversee the Office of Impact Analysis (Productivity Commission, 2025b).

The Commission is candid about scale and about risk. It describes the $10 billion figure as amounting to “a 6–9% reduction in compliance and delay costs over four years, which is in line with the 6% reduction in these costs that the Australian Government achieved over two years from 2014 after setting itself reduction targets” — that is, ambitious but demonstrably achievable. And it warns that “targets create strong incentives for regulators to constrain measured regulatory burdens, but this does not necessarily align with desirable regulatory outcomes (for example, removing socially beneficial regulations would help achieve targets, but would be to the detriment of Australians more broadly)” (Productivity Commission, 2025b). We quote that warning deliberately. A party that campaigns on honesty should not sell a red tape target without the caveat printed on the tin.

New South Wales has its own history here, and it is not flattering. The state’s 2021 productivity White Paper records the Audit Office of New South Wales finding that a “one-in-two-out” rule and a red tape reduction target were largely ineffective at long-term red tape reduction, with legislative complexity increasing over the life of the initiative (NSW Productivity Commission, 2021). The same White Paper puts the cost to New South Wales of weaknesses in the regulatory impact analysis process alone at around $500 million a year, counting administrative costs, substantive compliance costs, fees and charges, and the cost of delay (NSW Productivity Commission, 2021).

Meanwhile the administrative reality is documented. The Audit Office’s 2024 synthesis of 19 audits conducted between 2018 and early 2024 found systemic gaps across New South Wales regulators: unclear regulatory approaches leaving regulated entities uncertain about priorities and obligations; incomplete or outdated information about regulated entities; inadequate quality assurance, with regulatory decisions often lacking documented reasoning and escalation thresholds poorly defined; and insufficient, untimely guidance — despite guidance that encourages voluntary compliance being more cost-effective than enforcement (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2024). Small businesses experience these failures as delay and confusion, and they have no compliance department to absorb either.

What small businesses themselves say is consistent. At the end of 2025, red tape was named as a concern by 77 per cent of New South Wales small businesses — a record high in the Small Business Commission’s monthly Momentum survey, which draws on more than 8,000 businesses a year — behind only the cost of business inputs at 84 per cent and ahead of cashflow at 75 per cent (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). The Commission’s statewide red tape discovery project, engaging more than 1,100 small businesses, identified duplicative reporting, complex licensing, planning delays, difficulty accessing government procurement opportunities and poor digital usability as the recurring themes.

Getting paid

Late payment is the most common commercial injury small businesses suffer and the least discussed in tax and regulatory debate. The Payment Times Reporting Regulator’s data, covering 3,098 reporting entities, shows that large businesses and Commonwealth entities took 27.4 days on average to pay small business suppliers — but that only 66.5 per cent of small business invoices were paid on time, against an average common payment term of 29 days. On average, 80 per cent of small business invoices were paid within 39 days and 95 per cent within 64 days, more than double the agreed common payment term (Payment Times Reporting Regulator, 2026). Around one third of small business invoices, in other words, are paid after the terms both parties agreed to.

The tail is getting worse. For the reporting period 1 January to 30 June 2025, the number of days taken to pay 95 per cent of small business invoices “rose to 64 days from the previous 58 days”, which the Regulator describes as showing that “while average payment times remained relatively stable, it indicates the slowest payments are getting even slower. This disproportionately affects cash flow for small businesses” (Payment Times Reporting Regulator, 2026). This matters because small businesses are not a peripheral part of large supply chains: 3,098 reporting entities bought from small business suppliers, sourcing on average 28.7 per cent of their total procurement value from them (Payment Times Reporting Regulator, 2026). The Regulator notes that previous research shows a 30-day payment time from large businesses to their small business suppliers delivers over $300 million to the Australian economy.

New South Wales has the right instrument and the wrong incentive. The Faster Payment Terms Policy requires most agencies, under the Government Sector Finance Act 2018, to pay a registered small business supplier within five business days of a correctly rendered invoice of any value, with small business defined as fewer than 20 full-time equivalent employees and not a subsidiary or partner of a larger business (buy.nsw, 2025). But interest is discretionary: agencies “may pay interest on late accounts if included in the agency’s supplier payment policy”, and are merely “encouraged to consider the impact” (buy.nsw, 2025). A payment obligation without an automatic consequence is a hope. The plumbing to make it automatic already exists — more than 400,000 businesses and more than 300 state, territory and local government organisations are on the Peppol eInvoicing network, and most New South Wales agencies can receive eInvoices (ATO, 2026).

When payment fails and a dispute begins, the formal system prices small businesses out. The Ombudsman’s Access to Justice work found that 44 per cent of small business disputes concern the payment of invoices; that 41 per cent of small businesses resolve disputes without escalation, against 67 per cent for larger businesses; that where a formal legal pathway was used the average cost was over $130,000; and that two out of three business relationships ended as a result. Of disputes that were escalated but abandoned, “the predominant reason was that costs outweighed potential gains”, and for matters worth less than around $100,000 the report concludes that formal court proceedings are simply “economically unviable for small business” (ASBFEO, 2020). Against that, the NSW Small Business Commission’s mediation service — 350 mediations conducted and 1,960 applications managed in 2025, with a 94 per cent customer experience satisfaction score and many matters resolved before formal mediation was needed — is one of the highest-return public services in the state (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). It should be bigger, better resourced, and given teeth for straightforward debt matters.

Tax settings that penalise growth

Payroll tax is the state’s largest single tax. Budget Paper No. 1 forecasts $14,945 million in 2026–27, ahead of transfer duty at $12,598 million and land tax at $8,969 million, out of total taxation revenue of $52,149 million; payroll tax is projected to rise to $17,470 million by 2029–30, average growth of 5.3 per cent a year (NSW Treasury, 2026). The benchmark is remuneration above $1.2 million, taxed at 5.45 per cent (NSW Treasury, 2026; Revenue NSW, 2026a).

That threshold has not moved since 1 July 2020, when it was raised from $1 million to $1.2 million (Revenue NSW, 2020). Over the same period the ABS wage price index for New South Wales — total hourly rates of pay excluding bonuses, all sectors, all industries — rose from 133.6 in the June quarter of 2020 to 159.3 in the March quarter of 2026, a rise of 19.2 per cent (ABS, 2026). A business that has employed exactly the same people, on wages that have merely kept pace with that index since mid-2020, is now paying roughly $1.43 million where it once paid $1.2 million. Nothing about it has grown. Its tax position has changed anyway. The Budget itself records payroll tax being revised up by $317.2 million in 2025–26 and $942.9 million over the four years to 2029–30 on the strength of employment and wage growth (NSW Treasury, 2026).

We should be straightforward about the counter-case. Payroll tax is, by the standards of state taxation, a relatively broad and efficient tax, and indexation would cost real revenue that would have to be found elsewhere. It also already carries deliberate carve-outs the state has chosen to fund: exemptions and rebates for apprentices ($103 million in 2026–27) and trainees ($43 million), and a rebate for medical centres meeting bulk-billing thresholds introduced from 4 September 2024 (NSW Treasury, 2026). The question is not whether payroll tax should exist. It is whether the state should keep collecting more of it by not touching the dial, and calling the result stability.

The contractor and employment agent provisions are a separate and sharper problem. Payments under a “relevant contract” are payroll-taxable unless one of seven exemptions applies — including where services are ancillary to the supply of goods, are not ordinarily required by the business, were provided for 180 days or fewer, or 90 days or fewer, were also provided to the general public, were performed by two or more persons, or involve owner-drivers — and only the labour component is taxable (Revenue NSW, 2026b). These began as anti-avoidance rules. Their application to modern contracting arrangements has become uncertain enough that the NSW Legislative Council’s Portfolio Committee No. 1 opened an inquiry into them, with the Acting Small Business Commissioner appearing as a witness in March 2025 (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026). For a business with no in-house tax capability, the risk is not the rate. It is a retrospective assessment for a treatment it believed was correct.

Insurance costs have moved sharply in the same window. icare confirmed an average workers compensation premium rate increase of 8 per cent for 2025–26, in line with a statutory ministerial direction capping the average rate of increase at 8 per cent a year over three consecutive years, across a scheme covering more than 338,000 employers and 3.5 million workers (icare, 2025). Industry classification rates have since been frozen for 2026–27 under the Government’s legislated reforms (icare, 2026). For a business at the point of taking on its first employee, three consecutive 8 per cent increases followed by a freeze is not stability; it is a step change followed by a pause. A freeze buys time. It does not answer the claims costs sitting underneath it, and small employers deserve to be told which of those two things is being offered.

Licensing, mutual recognition, and the standards you have to buy

Entry barriers are the part of this debate where the Democrats part company with both the incumbents who defend them and the deregulators who would sweep them away unexamined. The state’s own Productivity and Equality Commission finds New South Wales occupational entry regulations on average more stringent than Victoria’s and Queensland’s, and nominates three occupations for review on the evidence: hairdressers, where New South Wales scores 1.25 on its index against 0.00 in both Victoria and Queensland; air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics, at 2.58 against 1.00 and 1.42; and project builders, at 2.50 against 2.42 and 1.83 (NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, 2024). New South Wales and South Australia are the only states that require hairdressers to hold an industry qualification, a Certificate III taking 12 to 34 months full-time at a cost of around $13,000 (NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, 2024). A 2016 departmental review found that requirement imposed burden without significant benefit; it was retained anyway after industry opposition (NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, 2024). That sequence — evidence in, lobbying over the top — is the reason we want the test written down in advance.

The method for doing it already exists. IPART’s best-practice licensing framework is on the shelf, and the state’s own Commission recommends regulators adopt it, alongside negative licensing trials for genuinely low-risk occupations and time-limited regulatory experiments where the risk is contested (NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, 2024). So does the mobility reform: New South Wales has exempted general builders, mining surveyors, teachers, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and property agents from Automatic Mutual Recognition, and both air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and project builders were due to enter the scheme in July 2024 before each was granted a further twelve-month exemption (NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, 2024). Every one of those exemptions may be defensible. None of them has had to prove it in public.

The standards problem is smaller in dollars and larger in principle. Where Australian Standards are mandated by law, access is sold under a private licensing model at $100 to over $500 per standard, with frequent updates requiring repurchase; one small electrical engineering business reported needing hundreds of standards for a single infrastructure project, at a cost exceeding the project’s profit margin (NSW Small Business Commission, 2025). Set that against the national prize: the Productivity Commission estimates that aligning mandatory Australian standards with international benchmarks is worth $1.1 billion to $3 billion a year (Productivity Commission, 2025a). The Commonwealth has since moved — the 2026–27 Budget commits to “providing free access to all standards referenced in Australian legislation” (Australian Government, 2026) — which turns the question from whether to do it into whether the standards New South Wales mandates in its own instruments are covered, and how quickly. A state that mandates a document should not also be the reason a five-person firm cannot afford to read it.

Government as a customer, and the front door

The single largest thing the New South Wales Government does for small business is buy from it — and pay on time. The Faster Payment Terms Policy has the design right and the incentive wrong (buy.nsw, 2025). The procurement settings have the opposite problem: New South Wales requires at least 10 per cent of the non-price evaluation weighting on contracts of $3 million or more to be allocated to SME participation, but defines an SME as an enterprise with fewer than 200 full-time equivalent employees (buy.nsw, 2021) — a category that includes firms a hundred times the size of the 893,421 New South Wales businesses with fewer than twenty employees (ABS, 2025b). A policy that treats a 190-person engineering firm and a two-person trade business as the same beneficiary will reliably deliver for the first. Difficulty accessing government procurement was, unsurprisingly, one of the barriers small businesses named in the Commission’s statewide red tape work (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026).

The demand-side evidence says the service model works when it exists. The Service NSW Business Bureau responded to more than 265,000 requests for assistance in its first year and delivered around 45,000 hours of free tailored business advice (Service NSW, 2024); the Small Business Commission ran 350 mediations and managed 1,960 mediation applications in 2025 at a 94 per cent customer experience satisfaction score (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026), against an average formal legal pathway cost of over $130,000 (ASBFEO, 2020). And where insolvency does arrive, it arrives hardest in the subcontracting chains that retention money rules are supposed to protect: 1,128 New South Wales companies entered external administration in construction in 2024–25 (ASIC, 2025), while the retention money trust obligation reaches only head contractors on projects valued over $20 million (NSW Government, 2026). Business-related insolvencies across New South Wales numbered 5,517 in 2025 (NSW Small Business Commission, 2026).

Finally, the cheapest reform on this list costs the state nothing at all. Around one in five Australian workers is subject to a non-compete clause; similar businesses without such clauses pay workers 4 per cent more on average; and Treasury’s microdata analysis found no systematic evidence that workers are compensated for the mobility restriction (Treasury, 2025). The Commonwealth has announced a ban for low- and middle-income workers, along with wage-fixing and no-poach agreements, to take effect from 2027 following consultation and legislation (Treasury, 2025). A new entrant cannot outbid an incumbent for staff. It can offer a better job. Competition policy that lets the worker accept it is small business policy.

Statistical sources

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2025a). Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits, July 2021 – June 2025. Canberra: ABS. Available at: Counts of Australian Businesses, July 2021 – June 2025

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2025b). Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits, July 2021 – June 2025: data cube 2, businesses by main state by industry class by employment size ranges. Canberra: ABS. Available at: Counts of Australian Businesses — data cube 2, employment size ranges

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2026). Wage Price Index, Australia, March quarter 2026: table 2b, total hourly rates of pay excluding bonuses, all sectors by state, original index numbers. Canberra: ABS. Available at: Wage Price Index, Australia, March 2026

Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). (2025). Insolvency statistics: series 3, companies entering external administration and controller appointments, by industry and state, 2024–25. Sydney: ASIC. Available at: ASIC insolvency statistics

Commonwealth policy and regulatory sources

Australian Government. (2026). Budget 2026–27: Productivity. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Available at: Budget 2026–27 — Productivity

Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman (ASBFEO). (2020). Access to Justice Report. Canberra: ASBFEO, November 2020. Available at: Access to Justice Report (PDF)

Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman (ASBFEO). (2025a). Number of small businesses in Australia — small business counts and turnover data, Small Business Data Portal. Canberra: ASBFEO. Available at: Number of small businesses in Australia

Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman (ASBFEO). (2025b). Contribution to Australian Employment — small business employment, the transition from non-employing to employing, and employment by business size. Canberra: ASBFEO, November 2025. Available at: Contribution to Australian Employment (PDF)

Australian Taxation Office (ATO). (2026). eInvoicing for government: businesses and government organisations on the Peppol network. Canberra: ATO. Available at: eInvoicing for government

Payment Times Reporting Regulator. (2025). Regulator’s update – July 2025. Canberra: Payment Times Reporting Regulator. Available at: Regulator’s update – July 2025 (PDF)

Payment Times Reporting Regulator. (2026). Regulator’s update – January 2026 (reporting period 1 January to 30 June 2025). Canberra: Payment Times Reporting Regulator. Available at: Regulator’s update – January 2026

Productivity Commission. (2025a). National Competition Policy analysis 2025: study report. Canberra: Productivity Commission. Available at: National Competition Policy analysis 2025: study report

Productivity Commission. (2025b). Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy: inquiry report. Canberra: Productivity Commission, December 2025. Available at: Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy: inquiry report

The Treasury. (2025). Reform to non-compete clauses and other restraints on workers. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Available at: Reform to non-compete clauses and other restraints on workers

New South Wales sources

Audit Office of New South Wales. (2024). Regulation insights. Special report, 21 March 2024. Sydney: Audit Office of New South Wales. Available at: Regulation insights

buy.nsw. (2021). Small and Medium Enterprise and Regional Procurement Policy. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Small and Medium Enterprise and Regional Procurement Policy

buy.nsw. (2025). Faster Payment Terms Policy. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Faster Payment Terms Policy

icare. (2025). icare confirms 8% average workers compensation premium rate increase in 2025/26. Sydney: Insurance and Care NSW. Available at: icare confirms 8% average premium rate increase in 2025/26

icare. (2026). icare confirms 2026-27 workers compensation premium settings. Sydney: Insurance and Care NSW. Available at: icare confirms 2026-27 workers compensation premium settings

NSW Government. (2026). Retention money held by head contractors — retention money trust requirements under the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 1999. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Retention money held by head contractors

NSW Productivity and Equality Commission. (2024). Better occupational entry regulations: policy implications of new research. Sydney: NSW Government, September 2024. Available at: Better occupational entry regulations (PDF)

NSW Productivity Commission. (2021). Productivity Commission White Paper 2021 — Rebooting the economy. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: NSW Productivity Commission White Paper 2021

NSW Small Business Commission. (2025). Submission to the Productivity Commission — National Competition Policy Analysis 2025 (submission 18). Sydney: NSW Small Business Commission, July 2025. Available at: Submission 18 — NSW Small Business Commission (PDF)

NSW Small Business Commission. (2026). Annual Report 2025. Sydney: NSW Small Business Commission. Available at: NSW Small Business Commission Annual Report 2025 (PDF)

NSW Treasury. (2026). Budget Paper No. 1: Budget Statement, 2026–27. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Budget Paper No. 1 — Budget Statement 2026–27 (PDF)

Revenue NSW. (2020). 2020 State Budget: payroll tax threshold increased from $1 million to $1.2 million from 1 July 2020. Sydney: Revenue NSW. Available at: 2020 State Budget

Revenue NSW. (2026a). Payroll tax: thresholds and rates. Sydney: Revenue NSW. Available at: Payroll tax — thresholds and rates

Revenue NSW. (2026b). Payroll tax: contractors and relevant contract provisions. Sydney: Revenue NSW. Available at: Payroll tax — contractors

Service NSW. (2024). Business Bureau delivers for business in its first year. Sydney: Service NSW. Available at: Business Bureau delivers for business in its first year