most trusted brands in Australia

You have changed your logo (possibly twice) new website, new tagline. A rebrand that cost more than you’d like to say out loud, and a folder of files you have barely opened since.

You’ve tried the ads, the posting, the SEO, the coach and the honest answer (if anyone asked) is that nothing has really changed.

Last week Roy Morgan published its 2026 Trusted Brand Awards. Twenty-two categories. Nineteen of the winners went back to back from last year. Eight of them have won their category every single year since the awards began in 2019.

They didn’t do any of the things you’ve been doing.

This is a guide to who won, how the trust is actually measured and why the list moving so little is the most useful thing in it for a business your size.

Contents

Who won: the full 2026 list

The most trusted brands in Australia for 2026 were announced by Roy Morgan on 3 September, covering the twelve months to June 2026. Bunnings took the overall “Best of the Best” title for the third consecutive year.

Worth clearing up before we go further, because the names get muddled: this is Roy Morgan’s program. It isn’t the separately run Trusted Brands awards you may have seen attached to Reader’s Digest. Different research house, different method and a very different list.

Category 2026 winner
Retail Bunnings
Department and discount department stores Kmart
Supermarkets and convenience stores ALDI
Charities The Salvation Army
Services Australia Post
Automotive Toyota
Superannuation and wealth management AustralianSuper
Consumer products Samsung
Technology Apple
Food and beverage Cadbury
Payments, cards and loans PayPal
Pharmaceutical CSL
Insurance NRMA
Private health insurance HBF
Banks Commonwealth Bank
Government services CSIRO
Utilities Red Energy
Media ABC
Mining and petroleum BHP
Travel and tourism Virgin Australia
Telecommunications Aussie Broadband
Video sharing and social media YouTube

Look at that list and try to find a brand that’s had a dramatic year. A viral campaign, a bold repositioning, a logo everyone argued about.

You won’t and that’s the point.

What Roy Morgan actually measured

Roy Morgan is Australia’s largest independent research company and has been collecting consumer data for more than eighty years. The awards began in 2019 and sit on top of the Roy Morgan Risk Monitor, an ongoing survey of roughly 1,500 to 2,000 Australians a month covering more than 1,000 brands across 27 industry sectors.

Two things about how it works matter more than the winners.

The questions are unprompted. Roy Morgan describes the survey as open ended and context free. Nobody hands respondents a list of brands to rate. People are asked which brands they trust and why, and which they distrust and why, and they answer from memory, in their own words.

That’s a brutally high bar. Your customer has to remember you exist, and then be able to say why they’d back you, without being reminded of either.

It nets trust against distrust. The winning metric is Net Trust, not trust. Roy Morgan’s own framing is that winners pair market leading trust with distrust levels low enough to be negligible. Which means a brand can be well known, well liked by its fans, and still lose because it’s quietly annoying enough people to cancel itself out.

Most business owners have never thought about the second account… We’ll come back to it.

The eight brands that have never lost their category

Eight brands have won their category every year the awards have run.

Brand Category Consecutive wins
Bunnings Retail 8 (2019 to 2026)
Kmart Department and discount department stores 8 (2019 to 2026)
Toyota Automotive 8 (2019 to 2026)
Australia Post Services 8 (2019 to 2026)
Samsung Consumer products 8 (2019 to 2026)
NRMA Insurance 8 (2019 to 2026)
CSL Pharmaceutical 8 (2019 to 2026)
ABC Media 8 (2019 to 2026)

Eight years, a pandemic, a supply chain crisis, an inflation spike, a cost of living squeeze, the arrival of AI and a full turnover of marketing fashion.

Australia Post is a brand people complain about constantly and trust completely, that gap is worth sitting with.

Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine drew the obvious conclusion from what people said about the winners. It didn’t sound like advertising doing its job. It sounded like the same experience delivered over and over, for long enough that reliability hardened into public confidence.

That’s the mechanism, not a campaign and not repetition.

Why Australia’s most trusted brand is trusted for boring reasons

Here’s the part I find quietly funny and I say this as someone who sells brand strategy for a living.

Roy Morgan published the reasons Australians gave for trusting Bunnings:

  • Fair and affordable prices.
  • Staff who know what they’re talking about.
  • Products that do the job.
  • A focus on the customer.
  • A range wide enough to cover what people came in for.

Not purpose, not values, not a brand story about the founder’s journey.

The most trusted brand in the country is trusted because the sausage sizzle is always there and the bloke in the aisle knows which drill bit you need.

This is where a lot of brand advice goes wrong and where a lot of money gets wasted. Trust isn’t built by saying something moving, it’s built by being the same thing repeatedly until people stop bracing for disappointment.

Which is also why your rebrand didn’t change anything. A rebrand can change how you look on day one but it can’t manufacture the eight years of consistent experience underneath it. If the experience doesn’t change, all you’ve done is redecorate the front of a promise nobody has tested yet.

That’s the gap between how a brand looks and how it performs and it’s the single most common thing I see in established businesses.

Distrust is a separate account and most businesses never check it

Trust and distrust aren’t two ends of one slider. Roy Morgan measures them separately and nets them off, because people can hold both about the same brand.

You almost certainly have a distrust balance you’ve never looked at. It’s made of small things.

  • The quote that took nine days.
  • The proposal with the last client’s name still in it.
  • The website that says “over 15 years” when the About page says twelve.
  • The premium price attached to a brand that looks like a startup put it together on a Sunday.
  • The claim on your homepage you couldn’t actually prove if someone asked.

None of these lose you a client on their own. Together they build a quiet, unspoken case that you’re not quite as buttoned up as you say you are. And most of them sit in the parts of the business you stopped looking at years ago, which is usually the website and the design work that goes out under your name.

It’s also not a fixed picture. Roy Morgan’s quarterly Risk Monitor update in August 2026 reported growing distrust in AI brands including OpenAI and Palantir. Distrust accumulates faster than trust does, and from things nobody complains to you about.

The businesses that win their category for eight straight years aren’t the ones with the boldest brand. They’re the ones with almost nothing in the second column.

Signs you have awareness, not trust

Awareness is people knowing you exist, trust is people betting on you without checking. Very different assets and it’s easy to mistake the first for the second.

  • Referrals describe what you do inaccurately, or vaguely, or differently every time.
  • You get shortlisted often and chosen rarely.
  • People ask for a proposal, then go quiet, then reappear six months later having gone elsewhere and come back.
  • You’re asked to justify your price in almost every conversation.
  • Clients want to start small before committing to the real thing.
  • Nobody can repeat your positioning back to you in their own words.
  • Your best work lives in your head and your team’s memory, not in anything a customer would experience consistently.

If most of these landed, the problem isn’t visibility and it isn’t your logo. It’s that the experience underneath isn’t repeatable enough to become a reputation. That’s a strategy problem, not a marketing one and it’s why a clear brand strategy matters more than your logo.

FAQs

What are the most trusted brands in Australia in 2026?

Bunnings is Australia’s most trusted brand for 2026, winning Roy Morgan’s overall Best of the Best award for the third consecutive year. Roy Morgan announced twenty-two category winners on 3 September 2026, including Kmart, ALDI, Toyota, Australia Post, Samsung, Apple, Commonwealth Bank, NRMA, the ABC, Virgin Australia and Aussie Broadband.

How is brand trust actually measured?

Roy Morgan measures Net Trust, which is trust minus distrust, using unprompted survey questions through its Risk Monitor. Respondents name the brands they trust and distrust from memory and explain why, rather than rating a supplied list. Winning a category requires both high trust and negligible distrust.

How long does it take to build brand trust?

Longer than a campaign and shorter than you fear, but it’s measured in years of consistent delivery rather than months of marketing. The eight brands that have won their Roy Morgan category every year since 2019 got there through repetition of the same experience, not through any single launch or rebrand.

Can a small business build the same kind of trust as a big brand?

Yes, and often faster, because trust is category relative rather than absolute. Nobody needs to trust you nationally. They need to trust you more than the three other options they’re weighing up, which is a far smaller job than it sounds.

Does a rebrand improve brand trust?

Not on its own. A rebrand changes how you’re perceived at first contact, but trust is built by what happens after that, repeatedly. If the underlying experience doesn’t change, a new identity just raises expectations you’ll then fail to meet, which can cost you trust rather than build it.

What damages brand trust the fastest?

Inconsistency and unprovable claims. Distrust accumulates from small gaps between what a brand says and what a customer experiences, and unlike complaints, most of it never reaches the business owner. Because Net Trust nets the two off, a brand can be widely liked and still lose on the strength of what it’s quietly costing itself.

My takeaways

The 2026 list is almost identical to the 2025 list, that’s not a boring result, it’s the finding.

Trust is the one brand asset that can’t be bought, borrowed or accelerated. It’s built by doing a knowable thing, the same way, for long enough that people stop checking. Which means every year you spend changing what you are is a year you’re not building the only thing that compounds.

The eight brands at the top of that table didn’t win by being interesting, they won by being predictable, on purpose, for eight years running.

Most businesses I meet don’t need a new look. They need to decide what they are and then be boring about it for a very long time.

Simply pick the thing. Then don’t change it.