Social procurement is growing. The question is who it reaches.

Disclosure. Just Gold, which funds and publishes Pride in Business, has been a Social Traders certified social enterprise since 2019. It has also worked with Social Traders as a client, including producing its digital awards and providing photography and video for Convene 2026.

The headline is 304 million dollars. That is the amount Social Traders reported its business and government members spent with certified social enterprises in the 2025 financial year, an increase of 18 per cent on the year before and the highest single year total on record. Across the eight years from 2018 to 2025 the reported total passed 1.4 billion dollars, and the organisation puts the average annual growth over that period at about 35 per cent. It is important to read those figures precisely. The 35 per cent is a historical average, not the current rate; the 18 per cent is the latest annual increase; and the population is spending captured through Social Traders’ member reporting, not every dollar of social procurement in Australia.

Read precisely, they are still remarkable. A market that has grown every year for eight years from reported purchasing rather than survey estimates is not a marketing story. It reflects a genuine shift in how large organisations in this country buy, and the composition confirms it: building trades, repairs and maintenance has become the largest category by volume, which means certified social enterprises are winning core operational contracts rather than the coffee and catering purchases that characterise programs in their first years.

What a rising total can conceal

Imagine two reporting years with the same increase in spend. In one, the increase comes from a single large contract awarded to an established supplier. In the other, a dozen smaller enterprises win their first piece of work. Both lift the total by the same amount and they describe entirely different experiences of participation. A rise can also reflect more members submitting data, existing buyers buying more, price changes, or a different mix of contracts, and a total alone cannot separate those explanations. That is a reason to read the method and the breakdowns, not to discount the number.

The ownership question the figures cannot answer

Social enterprise certification describes an enterprise’s purpose and operations. It does not classify the identity of its owners. The 1.4 billion dollars therefore cannot tell us what share went to LGBTIQA+ owned enterprises, and it would be equally wrong to conclude that none did. An LGBTIQA+ owned business may already be certified and trading inside that network, counted as a social enterprise and invisible as anything else.

That is what category growth looks like from outside the category. Every dollar of that total reached a business that could be identified as qualifying, because buyers can only direct spend to a category they can see. For a group that is not a category, a rising social procurement market is not a rising tide. It is someone else’s tide, visible through the window.

Someone else’s tide

This is not a complaint about social enterprise certification, which does its job and does it well. It is an observation about how these markets work: the money follows the test, and only the test. It also points to the immediate practical route for any business currently outside the frame, which is to qualify inside an existing category where the business genuinely fits. An LGBTIQA+ owned enterprise that meets the social enterprise standard can be certified and counted today. That is a real answer for some businesses and no answer for most, because most businesses are not social enterprises and should not have to become one to be seen.

What the growth figures show is that a certified, reportable category attracts spend, and keeps attracting it. What the research has to establish is who is inside it, who is outside it, and whether the people outside it are there by design or by default. Answering that without asking owners to disclose more than they should is the research design problem, and it is a solvable one.

Sources

1. Social Traders. FY25 Impact Report, pages 8, 9 and 17.
2. Social Traders. What FY25 reveals about where social procurement is headed, 18 May 2026.
3. Social Traders. Social Enterprise Certification: full guidance notes, August 2025.
4. Victorian Government. Social procurement overview.

Source pages last checked 19 September 2026.