Is a valid ABN enough to register any available .COM.AU?

[nicenicnicenic is verified member.]

Not necessarily. A valid ABN or ACN establishes part of the eligibility, but the requested .com.au name still has to satisfy the .au allocation rules.

auDA has also approved in principle a change that would remove goods, services, events, activities or premises as allocation bases. It isn't in force yet.

For anyone who has handled .com.au registrations, what usually causes the rejection when the ABN itself is valid?

 

[ElhagMousab]

I have done enough .com.au registrations to stop assuming the ABN field is what fails, because it usually is not. What breaks is the connection test between the name and the entity, and the registrar compares the string on the ABR record against the name you asked for almost character by character.

Sole traders take most of the hits. The ABN sits under a personal name while the domain mirrors a trading name that was never linked to it, so the exact or close match fails on the spot. Cancelled ABNs and entities not shown as active fail too, and names needing separate approval or restricted words get knocked back regardless of eligibility.

The one nobody warns you about is the auDA audit. A sample of registrations is reviewed each year and evidence is requested within a short window, and that is where a valid ABN turns into a suspended name weeks after checkout. So no, the ABN alone is not enough, and in my experience the rejection almost always comes from that connection step rather than from eligibility itself.