Building designers: public liability requirements in Western Australia

Verified for Western Australia

• Licence liability condition: Not applicable — this is not a registered class in Western Australia, so there is no registration for an insurance condition to attach to. Where insurance does bite in the WA building services scheme it is on two contractor families only: building surveying contractors and building engineering contractors. Builders and painting contractors carry no insurance requirement in the registration Regulations at all. WA · effective 2026-08-25 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
• Licence evidence required: None, since the work is unregistered. WA · effective 2026-08-25 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
• Licensing body: Building design is not a registered class in Western Australia. The word designer does not appear anywhere in the Building Services (Registration) Regulations 2011, whose prescribed class list is exhaustive. The design references in that instrument are all to certificates of design compliance, an interstate recognition list, or qualification names. Architects are registered under their own separate Act, and the engineering and surveying streams are registered — building designers as such are not. WA · effective 2026-08-25 Western 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 the limit figure on a certificate means
• Cover for the principal for your work
• When a certificate falls short of the contract

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

• New South Wales Government — New South Wales — consolidated legislation
• NSW Government — NSW — design and building practitioner registration
• Victoria Government — Victoria — consolidated legislation
• Queensland Government — Queensland — consolidated legislation
• Western Australia Government — Western Australia — consolidated legislation
• South Australia Government — South Australia — consolidated legislation
• Tasmania Government — Tasmania — consolidated legislation
• Australian Capital Territory Government — Australian Capital Territory — consolidated legislation
• Northern Territory Government — Northern Territory — consolidated legislation