В Австралии резко сократилось число самозанятых в творческих сферах: их доля упала с 45% до 30%

Creative sole trader sign-ups have dropped from 45% to 30% since 2021, while cleaning is up 77%. Rounded’s Oliver Garside explains the shift. Five years ago, a new sole trader in Australia was most likely a photographer or a designer. Today, according to new data, they’re just as likely to be a cleaner, a personal trainer or running a construction business. The analysis comes from Rounded, a sole trader accounting platform, which looked at five years of sign-up data from its Australian users. Creative and content occupations, including graphic design, photography, copywriting, web design and video production, made up 44.7% of new users in 2021. By 2026, that share had fallen to 30.4%. Physical and in-person work moved the opposite direction. Cleaning, construction, health and fitness, and trades industries together rose from 18.3% of new users in 2021 to 28.3% in 2026. Cleaning alone is up 77% as a share of sign-ups, health and fitness 75%, IT consulting 54% and construction 46%. The falls on the creative side were steep too. Writing and journalism is down 58%, graphic design down 35%, web design down 32%, photography down 26%, digital marketing down 18%, and video production down 15%. “We’ve watched this shift happen in real time, one sign-up at a time, first through COVID and then as the landscape has continued to adapt to new norms and changing realities,” said Oliver Garside, co-founder of Rounded. “Five years ago, if you asked us what a new Rounded customer looked like, we’d have said a photographer or a designer working for themselves, and while this group still make up a large cohort of our customers, a new Rounded user is just as likely to be someone who cleans, runs a personal training business, or does construction work.” Part of why the shift shows up so clearly after only five years comes down to how quickly the sole trader population itself turns over. Businesses on the Rounded platform that have wound up ran for a median of two years and three months from signup to their final use of the software. A group that refreshes that often will naturally look different every few years. Garside was careful not to pin the shift on a single cause. The steepest fall in creative sign-ups happened between 2021 and late 2022, with a second, smaller decline starting in early 2025, suggesting two separate movements rather than one steady trend. “We’re not going to pretend that there’s a single, neat explanation for all this,” Garside said. “What we can say is that it happened, it happened fast, and no-one in the business of supporting sole traders can afford to assume that the customer in front of them looks like the customer from five years ago, or will look like in another five years to come. There’s no such thing as a typical Rounded customer anymore, if there ever really was one. We’d rather build for who’s actually signing up than who used to.” That shift toward mobile, physical businesses is also behind Rounded’s latest product launch. The company has released Trax, a kilometre-tracking app, now available on both iOS and Android, aimed at sole traders who spend more time on the road than at a desk. It’s worth noting what this data can and can’t tell us. It’s drawn from 11,051 Rounded users who signed up between January 2021 and July 2026 and disclosed an industry, just over half of the platform’s total Australian sign-ups in that period. Rounded itself is upfront that the figures describe its own user base rather than the Australian sole trader population as a whole. Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.