By Roy, founder Last updated 18/08/2026
If you've shopped for a supplement in Australia, you've probably seen a little code on the label: AUST L, sometimes AUST R, sometimes nothing at all. It looks like a stamp of approval. Mostly, it isn't. Here's what it actually means, and why Settl doesn't carry one.
What does AUST L actually mean?
AUST L stands for "Australian Listed" on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods, run by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. A product with an AUST L number has been registered as a listed medicine, which lets the seller make certain low-level health claims, things like "supports relaxation" or "traditionally used for."
Here's the part that surprises people: the TGA does not check the evidence before it hands out an AUST L number. Listing is mostly a self-certification process. The company declares it holds evidence for its claims and meets manufacturing standards, pays the fee, and gets the number. The TGA audits a sample of listed products after the fact, not every one before it goes to market. So AUST L tells you a company has made a declaration, not that a regulator has independently verified the claim. Worth knowing before you read too much into it.
Why doesn't Settl have one?
Settl sits in the food category under the Food Standards Code, not the therapeutic goods framework. As a food, Settl has no AUST L listing, and none is being filed. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and it comes with a real trade-off that's worth spelling out plainly.
Foods and listed medicines play by different rulebooks. A listed medicine can make claims about what it does for you, in exchange for declaring evidence and following the medicines framework. A food can't make that kind of claim at all, no matter how it's formulated, but it can say exactly what's in it and how much.
Settl leans into the second option. Every ingredient and every amount is printed on the label: no proprietary blend, no "sleep support complex" hiding the individual doses inside a single combined number. That's the trade Roy made deliberately: give up the ability to say what the product does, in exchange for total transparency about what's actually in it.
What Settl can and can't say because of that
Because Settl is a food and not a listed medicine, you won't see it described as treating, curing, or preventing anything, and it never will be. We can't say it "supports sleep" or "aids relaxation" in the therapeutic-claim sense a listed product can. What we can say is what's on the pack: the exact ingredients, the exact milligrams, and that Settl is packed in Sydney, in a facility that holds a TGA manufacturing licence. That licence describes the facility's manufacturing standard. It isn't a TGA approval of the product, and Settl doesn't hold one.
If a listed product's claims sound more confident than that, check what sits behind them. Sometimes it's genuine evidence a company has put through the substantiation process. Sometimes it's a declaration nobody has audited yet. The AUST L number alone won't tell you which.
What you give up, and what you get, either way
Buying a listed product, you get access to a specific claim on the label and the manufacturer's declared confidence behind it. What you often don't get is the individual dose of each ingredient, because proprietary blends are common in that category and the total blend weight can hide how little of any one thing is actually in there.
Buying a food-format product like Settl, you get the reverse. No claim about what it does for you, but every number on the label is real and checkable. You can look up the RDI for any ingredient we use and compare it yourself, because we've given you the figure to compare.
Neither pathway is a shortcut and neither is automatically the trustworthy one. The honest version of this decision is: do you want a claim, or do you want the numbers? Read the label either way. That's the whole guide, more of it is in the Australian sleep supplement guide.
This is general information about how Australian labelling categories work, not legal or medical advice. If a specific claim matters to your decision, the label and the TGA's own public register are the places to check it yourself.
Cheers, Roy