Registered office and company addresses

Every Australian company must tell ASIC where it can be found. The registered office is the legal address where documents can be served on the company and where its registers are kept. The principal place of business is where it actually trades. Foreign companies registered in Australia add a registered address in their place of incorporation and the address of their local agent. ASIC also keeps a contact address for its own correspondence. asicapi returns each of these as an address record with a type, a status and the dates it applied, so you can see where a company is now and, with a historical extract, everywhere it has been.

Address types

For due diligence and debt recovery, the distinction matters. A statutory demand under section 459E or a court originating process is served at the registered office, not the trading premises, and service there is effective even if the company has moved without telling ASIC. The principal place of business is the better address for site visits, credit checks and identifying where the company actually operates.

The registered office must be in Australia and must be a street address; a post office box is not acceptable. A change of registered office is notified on Form 484 and takes effect seven days after lodgement (or later if the form says so), which is why an address record can have a from date in the future.

The address record

Address records are a section of a purchased company extract. Buy the extract once with POST /v1/companies/{id}/extracts; the records are in its addresses key, and GET /v1/companies/{id}/addresses reads them back from the most recent extract you hold, free of ASIC fees.

curl "https://api.asicapi.dev/v1/companies/004085616/addresses" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ASICAPI_KEY"

{
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    {
      "object": "address",
      "type": { "code": "RG", "label": "Registered Office" },
      "status": { "code": "C", "label": "Current" },
      "from": "2018-01-15",
      "to": null,
      "address": {
        "careOf": "C/- EXAMPLE ACCOUNTANTS",
        "line1": "LEVEL 3",
        "street": "12 EXAMPLE STREET",
        "locality": "MELBOURNE",
        "state": "VIC",
        "postcode": "3000",
        "country": "AUSTRALIA"
      },
      "sourceDocument": { "documentNumber": "0E5123456", "qualifier": null }
    },
    {
      "object": "address",
      "type": { "code": "PA", "label": "Principal Place of Business" },
      "status": { "code": "C", "label": "Current" },
      "from": "2012-06-01",
      "to": null,
      "address": {
        "careOf": null,
        "line1": "UNIT 7",
        "street": "45 SAMPLE DRIVE",
        "locality": "DANDENONG SOUTH",
        "state": "VIC",
        "postcode": "3175",
        "country": "AUSTRALIA"
      },
      "sourceDocument": { "documentNumber": "0E3345678", "qualifier": null }
    }
  ],
  "hasMore": false,
  "nextCursor": null,
  "totalCount": null,
  "extract": { "id": "ext_01J9AC1M5R7XN2", "type": "current", "purchasedAt": "2026-09-04T03:20:18Z", "asOf": "2026-09-04T03:20:15Z" },
  "meta": { "billable": false, "product": null, "requestId": "req_01J8ZK3V7Q0M2X" }
}

Fields

The same address composite is used for office holders' residential addresses, members' addresses and chargees, so one parser covers them all.

Current, ceased and future records

A current extract contains records with status C, plus any future-dated (F) address that has been lodged but not yet taken effect. A historical extract ("type": "historical" on the purchase) adds ceased (E) records with their to dates, giving the full sequence of registered offices and places of business back to registration or to the 1991 migration from state records; read them with status=former or status=all on the addresses endpoint. Asking for ceased records when you hold only a current extract returns extract_required (HTTP 402) with a historical purchase suggestion. Filter by type with type[], for example type[]=RG&type[]=RP to get only registered offices.

For office holders, the address shown is the residential address the person declared when appointed. It is the address recorded against that appointment, so the same director may show different addresses on different companies.

Partial addresses in search results

A name search does not return full addresses. Each match carries a partialAddress derived from the principal place of business: locality, state and postcode for Australian addresses, or locality and country for addresses overseas. The company object's principalPlace field is the same partial form. It is enough to tell two companies with similar names apart, but you need an extract for the street address.

{ "locality": "MELBOURNE", "state": "VIC", "postcode": "3000" }

Business names have no addresses at all in the data ASIC supplies, so partialAddress is null for BUSN matches and the business name object has no address fields.

Addresses on the professional registers

Registered auditors, registered liquidators and other professionals on ASIC's registers have their own address types, which appear on purchased register extracts rather than company extracts:

PA on a register means principal place of practice, not principal place of business. RB is the business address of an authorised representative and appears on the securities and futures representative registers.

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