Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Architects: professional indemnity requirements in Victoria

Cover for legal liability arising from professional advice or services, written on a claims-made basis.

Data as at

Verified for Victoria

  • Licence liability condition: Yes, and Victoria draws the requirement wider than most. Section 17A lets the Minister require architects, or a specified class of them, to be covered by insurance and to specify the kind and amount by order in the Government Gazette — and section 17A(7) defines insurance for this purpose to include professional indemnity insurance, an indemnity, public liability insurance, and insurance taken out by any body or person that covers the architect's work. So the obligation is not confined to professional indemnity the way it is elsewhere. Section 8B makes it an offence to carry out work as an architect without the required cover, and section 8C makes it a separate offence to hold out as insured while uninsured. The amount sits in the Ministerial Order rather than the Act, and that Order was not retrieved, so no figure is recorded here. VIC · effective 2026-08-25 Victoria Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: Victoria asks for proof twice over, which is unusually strict. Section 9(2)(e) requires an application for registration to include proof of the required cover. Section 15A then requires every architect who must be covered to give the Board written proof, by 1 July each year, that they will be covered until 30 June of the following year. Lapse is not automatic suspension: the Board's own guideline says an application will be refused if the applicant is not covered, and that if the Board learns a practising architect is no longer covered it may suspend their registration. The Act's automatic suspension power attaches to unpaid fees, not to insurance. VIC · effective 2026-08-25 Victoria Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: The Architects Registration Board of Victoria registers architects under the Architects Act 1991. VIC · effective 2026-08-25 Victoria Government · 2026-08-24

What contracts commonly ask for

Principals and head contractors set their own insurance requirements, and those are frequently higher than a licence condition. The requirement that binds is the higher of the two, and both have to be read from the actual document.

What this cover costs

This site publishes no cost benchmark for this cover. A benchmark needs a real sample of documents, and none is published until the sample is large enough to compute a median honestly. A benchmark from a handful of policies is a guess with a decimal point.

Sources