Selling into Australia from a US company: ABN, GST and the treaty (2026)

Your existing US company can hold an Australian ABN and register for GST in its own name. No Australian subsidiary, no local director, no Australian address. The entitlement rules were written to let an enterprise carried on entirely offshore register exactly as it is — a Delaware LLC and a Nevada C-corp are as registrable as a company incorporated in Sydney.

And unlike some jurisdictions your competitors sell through, the United States has a comprehensive tax treaty with Australia. That treaty is what keeps Australian income tax off your trading profits — not by exempting you, but by narrowing the question to something testable: is there a permanent establishment in Australia? For the standard marketplace pattern, usually no.

Two things before the detail. GST is a different system and the treaty does nothing for it — it applies to your Australian sales either way, and it is the part that costs or refunds real money this quarter. And US sellers carry one structural question nobody else does: how your LLC is classified.

(General information only, current at August 2026. Confirm your own position before acting.)

GST comes first, because GST is where the money is

Income tax gets the attention; GST gets the cash. Registration may be required once your GST turnover from sales connected with Australia reaches A$75,000 in any rolling 12-month period. Two features of that test surprise people:

• It measures Australian-connected sales, not global revenue. A US brand doing US$20m worldwide with A$60,000 of Australian sales may sit under the threshold; a first-year seller who lands one good Prime Day may sit above it.
• It looks forward as well as back — not only whether you have passed A$75,000 in the last 12 months, but whether you are likely to in the next 12. The obligation can arrive before the historic numbers show it.

“Connected with Australia” is the phrase doing the work, and the clean case for a US seller is stock: once your inventory is sitting in an Australian fulfilment centre when it sells, the sale is a domestic Australian supply. Not an export from Los Angeles — a sale of goods already in Australia, made by you, counting towards the threshold from the first unit. Direct shipments of low value goods and digital supplies have their own rules, and on marketplace sales the platform may be liable for the GST instead of you. Map each channel separately: non-resident GST registration has the full breakdown.

Standard or simplified — the decision that decides your border GST

Australia offers non-residents two registrations, and they are not tiers of the same thing. Simplified registration issues an ARN, needs no identity verification and is fast — but it cannot claim credits, so it can never give anything back. Standard registration is built on an ABN, requires the identity process below, and is the one that makes GST recoverable.

For an importer that difference is the whole ball game. When goods over A$1,000 clear the Australian border, 10% GST is payable there and then: a US brand landing A$400,000 of stock in a year hands over roughly A$40,000. On standard registration, where you are the importer of record on the customs entry, that comes back through your BAS. On simplified, it is a permanent cost.

The importer-of-record requirement catches more US sellers than the registration choice does. If your freight forwarder, 3PL or customs broker is named on the entry, the credit is theirs — regardless of who paid for the goods. For regular importers, the deferred GST scheme may move the payment off the border and into your BAS entirely.

Then income tax — and here the treaty changes the question

Australian domestic law taxes a foreign resident on ordinary income from Australian sources, and source is a common-law question of fact with no bright line. That is the analysis a seller faces with no treaty behind them.

The United States is not in that position. Where a comprehensive double tax agreement applies — given force in Australia by the International Tax Agreements Act 1953, and prevailing over the domestic source rules — its business profits article generally provides that Australia may tax an enterprise’s business profits only if it carries on business through a permanent establishment here, and then only the profits attributable to that establishment. The messy, fact-weighing source question is replaced by a defined one. Appreciate that for what it is: not an exemption, but predictability.

The contrast is not academic. Hong Kong has no comprehensive treaty with Australia, so a Hong Kong seller in an identical warehouse, on an identical platform, argues source of profits instead — a weighing exercise with no tiebreaker. If part of your group trades through a Hong Kong entity, that side runs on a genuinely different framework. Same stock, same listings, different law.

What FBA stock does — and what it does not do

It settles GST. It does not, on the standard pattern, create a permanent establishment.

The reason usually given is the treaty exemption for facilities used solely for storage, display or delivery. That is a real argument, but it belongs second. Since 2017, treaty change has narrowed those specific-activity exemptions where both countries made compatible choices — and for a pure reseller, storing and delivering trading stock is arguably a core function rather than something preparatory or auxiliary.

The argument that survives all of that is simpler: an Amazon fulfilment centre was never at your disposal. A fixed place of business requires an effective power to use the place. You cannot enter the building, direct its staff, or choose which warehouse your stock sits in. You hold a service contract for storage and fulfilment — not a right over premises.

US sellers get one extra piece of comfort here that most nationalities do not. The United States is not a party to the Multilateral Instrument, so the Australia–US treaty is unmodified and the storage exemptions stand as originally drafted — the fallback argument is intact. Lead with the disposal point anyway; it is stronger. The full three-tier analysis, including the agency question, is in does FBA stock create a permanent establishment.

What does change the answer: leasing your own or exclusive warehouse space, hiring Australian staff or sales contractors, giving someone here authority to conclude contracts — or a director relocating to Australia, which raises the larger question of central management and control. People-and-premises facts, not stock facts.

The LLC question — settle it before you scale, not after

Here is the wrinkle specific to American sellers, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than resolved glibly.

A very large share of US e-commerce trades through an LLC, the cheapest and most flexible vehicle to form domestically. But an LLC is a state-law entity whose US federal tax classification varies — it may be treated as a corporation, as a partnership, or as disregarded from its owner. Treaty benefits generally run to residents of a contracting state, and where an entity is fiscally transparent, the analysis of who is entitled to what — the entity, or the members, and on which income — is not the analysis that applies to a straightforward corporate resident.

We are not going to resolve that here, and neither should any article. What is fair to say:

• A US C-corporation is a conventional corporate counterparty for these purposes, and the permanent establishment analysis above sits on familiar ground.
• An LLC raises a live, entity-specific question about classification and treaty entitlement, turning on how it is classified, who its members are and where they are resident. Not a defect and not a trap — a question with an answer that has to be worked out on your facts.
• The cost of asking is trivial. The cost of finding out after three years of scale, mid-audit or mid-sale, is not.

If your Australian channel is growing into real numbers, put this on the table alongside the permanent establishment review and get the conclusion in writing — the same discipline that turns “we didn’t lodge a return” into a documented position rather than an omission. When a non-resident seller does and does not lodge covers that side, including the return-not-necessary advice that closes a year cleanly.

Proving who you are is what decides your timeline

The online application takes minutes. The identity evidence decides everything.

Non-resident applicants generally hold no Australian TFN, so the ABR cannot verify identity electronically and the application drops into a manual proof-of-identity queue. Certified copies of the company’s incorporation documents and of two current identity documents for the directors or office bearers must reach the ATO — and be processed — inside a 43-day window from lodgment. Miss it and the application is refused.

For US applicants the certification route is straightforward: notary public certification is standard and sufficient, with no translation step. Two rules catch people out anyway. Certified copies must be of the original physical documents — certified copies of digital identity documents are expressly not accepted. And every name string must match the application exactly. The full document set and failure patterns are in how to get an ABN as a non-resident; the route choice — existing company, subsidiary or ASIC-registered branch — is in ABN registration for foreign companies.

One sequencing point worth real money: register before your first container ships. Import GST recovery runs from your effective registration date, and backdating is a salvage operation, not a plan.

Two ways to run it

Do it yourself. The ABR application is free, and a careful US company can run it directly. The identity-evidence standards and the manual queue are where unassisted applications come unstuck, and the 43-day clock does not pause for a mis-certified passport copy.

The easier path: an experienced registered tax agent. An agent who works with non-resident registrations assembles the certified set to the standard the ATO actually applies, lodges through agent channels, answers ATO questions from the Australian side of the time zone, and sets up standard GST and the BAS cycle so border GST starts coming back from your first quarter — then documents the permanent establishment position while the facts are fresh.

What to do next

Start with the free two-minute GST registration check. When you are ready, start your ABN and GST application online — about ten minutes of scoping questions, no documents and no payment at the application stage. A Melbourne registered tax agent — TPB 26121271, a CPA and Chartered Accountant partnership working in English and 中文 — reviews your answers and comes back with what your structure actually needs, including whether the LLC question applies to you.

General information only, current at August 2026. It does not take your circumstances into account. Treaty entitlement, entity classification, permanent establishment and GST outcomes all depend on your specific facts and on the operative text of the relevant agreement, and rules can change. Confirm your position with a registered tax agent before acting.