Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Building designers: professional indemnity requirements in South Australia

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

Data as at

Verified for South Australia

  • Licence liability condition: Not applicable — there is no licence for a condition to attach to. Nor does the building work contractor licence itself carry a professional indemnity or public liability condition: every insurance reference in the Building Work Contractors Act 1995 sits in the building indemnity insurance Division or in the provision prohibiting misuse of a licence number to obtain such a policy. SA · effective 2026-08-25 South Australia Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: Not applicable. No building designer licence exists in South Australia. SA · effective 2026-08-25 South Australia Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: Building design is not a licensed occupation in South Australia, and the reason is structural rather than an oversight. The Building Work Contractors Act 1995 licenses building work, which it defines as physical work — constructing, erecting, underpinning, altering, repairing, improving, adding to or demolishing a building, excavating or filling a site for it, and the classes the regulations add such as pools, paving, fencing, insulation, painting, air conditioning, solar panels and plumbing, gas and electrical work. Design, drafting and documentation appear nowhere in that definition. Building consultant is sometimes mistaken for a licence class but it is not one: the term is defined only in the discipline Part of the Act, as a person other than a registered architect who carries on the business of giving advice or furnishing reports about domestic building work. There is no licensing or registration of building consultants — they are exposed to disciplinary action without ever having been licensed. SA · effective 2026-08-25 South Australia 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