What counts as misleading and deceptive conduct in Australia? A plain-English guide

Most Australian business owners have never read the Australian Consumer Law, and they don't need to. But there is one line in it that applies to every single thing you publish — your website, your ads, your quotes, your Instagram captions, the things you say on the phone — and it's worth ten minutes of your time.

The one-sentence version

Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law says a business must not engage in conduct, in trade or commerce, that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.¹

That's it. No list of banned words, no threshold, no requirement that anyone actually lost money. It's deliberately broad, and three things about it surprise people:

• You don't have to mean it. Intention isn't part of the test. Most breaches are careless, inherited from a template, or simply out of date.
• Nobody has to be misled. Conduct that is likely to mislead is enough.
• True statements can still breach it. The test is the overall impression an ordinary customer takes away, not whether each sentence survives a literal reading.

A separate provision, section 29, deals with specific false or misleading representations about goods and services — price, quality, standard, place of origin, testimonials, sponsorship or approval.¹

The four ways businesses trip themselves up without meaning to

• The claim was true once. "Family owned since 2009" after a sale. "24-hour response" after the team halved. Websites don't update themselves.
• Someone else wrote it. Agency copy, a theme demo, a supplier's product description pasted straight into your listing. You are responsible for it the moment it's on your site.
• The headline and the detail disagree. The big number is the message; the asterisk is not.
• The implication, not the words. Photos, badges, awards, logos and layout all make claims. So does silence about something a customer would obviously want to know.

Nine things on an ordinary business website worth a second look

1. "From $X" pricing. If almost nobody can actually buy at that price, or a fee is unavoidable, the headline figure is doing misleading work. The ACCC's position on component pricing is that the total minimum price a customer must pay needs to be stated at least as prominently.²
2. Superlatives. "Australia's best", "number one", "the leading". These are representations. If you can't point to a source, cut them or soften them to something you can support.
3. Testimonials and star ratings. They must be genuine, and they shouldn't be presented as typical if they aren't. Writing your own reviews, or filtering out the bad ones while implying the average, is treated seriously.³
4. Stock photography. A photo of a warehouse you don't have, a team of twelve when there are two, or a workshop that isn't yours all imply things you may not be able to back up.
5. "Australian made" and "Australian owned". These have specific legal meanings and a safe-harbour test. "Made in Australia" is not the same as "assembled in Australia" or "designed in Australia".⁴
6. Free trials and subscriptions. If "free" leads into an automatic charge, the conditions have to be clear and up-front, not buried at checkout.
7. Silence. Leaving out a material fact — a long lead time, a restocking fee, an exclusion — can mislead just as effectively as saying something untrue.
8. Comparisons with competitors. Fine if accurate and like-for-like. Comparing your price to a competitor's non-comparable product, or to a "was" price that was never really charged, is not.
9. Guarantee and warranty language. You can't offer less than the consumer guarantees that already apply by law, and implying that your policy is the customer's only remedy is itself misleading.⁵

Why the small print usually doesn't save you

The question isn't whether the correction exists somewhere on the page. It's what an ordinary member of the audience takes away from the whole thing. Australian courts have consistently looked at the dominant message — the headline, the image, the emphasis — and treated inconsistent fine print as unable to cure it.⁶

Practically, that means:

• Fine print that explains a claim the customer has already understood correctly: useful.
• Fine print that contradicts the headline: usually no help at all.
• If your disclaimer is doing the heavy lifting, rewrite the headline instead. It's cheaper than the alternative.

Who can act on it — and it isn't only the regulator

• The ACCC enforces the Australian Consumer Law nationally and publishes annual compliance and enforcement priorities.⁷
• State and territory fair trading offices handle a large share of everyday complaints — Consumer Affairs Victoria, NSW Fair Trading, and their equivalents.⁸
• Competitors and customers can bring private proceedings, and often do. In the real world most small-business disputes start with a letter from a competitor, not a regulator.
• Platforms also police claims independently. An ad rejection or a marketplace listing takedown can hurt sooner than any legal process.

Outcomes range from an undertaking or a corrective notice through to Federal Court proceedings and pecuniary penalties. The realistic risk for a small business is rarely a landmark case — it's lost time, a forced rewrite in the middle of a campaign, and a public correction.

A self-check you can run on your own site today

1. Open your homepage and read only the headings, buttons and image captions. Write down every factual claim they make. Can you evidence each one right now?
2. Search your site for numbers — years, percentages, prices, response times, customer counts. Confirm each is still current.
3. Search for superlatives: best, leading, first, only, cheapest, fastest, number one.
4. Check every price for the total a customer actually pays, including unavoidable fees.
5. Check that every testimonial is real, attributed, and not being presented as typical unless it is.
6. Read your About page as a stranger. Does it imply a size, history or capability you don't have?
7. Ask what a customer would be annoyed to discover after buying. That's your omission risk.

If a claim can't survive the question "how do you know that?", it needs either evidence or a rewrite before it stays live.

Frequently asked questions

Where to go from here

One category of claim gets more regulator attention than almost any other right now: anything about the environment, sustainability, recycling or emissions. The words are vague by nature, customers care a lot, and the evidence is hard to produce on demand — which is exactly the combination section 18 punishes.

If your site uses that kind of language, our plain-English guide to what you can and can't say breaks down the common words one by one, and our free homepage scan flags the specific wording on your own pages.

Related reading: 5 things on your website that could attract ACCC attention and why your product descriptions carry more risk than you think.