We give a complete characterization of a hypercyclic abelian semigroup of matrices on ℂn. For finitely generated semigroups, this characterization is explicit and it is used to determine the minimal number of matrices in normal form over ℂ that form a hypercyclic abelian semigroup on ℂn. In particular, we show that no abelian semigroup generated by n matrices on ℂn can be hypercyclic.