Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Demolition contractors: public liability requirements in New South Wales

Cover for legal liability to third parties for personal injury or property damage arising from business activities.

Data as at

Verified for New South Wales

  • Licence liability condition: Yes — and this is one of the few NSW licences that genuinely requires public liability insurance. SafeWork NSW's application requirements list "a public liability insurance certificate stating business activity is 'demolition'". The certificate must name the activity, so a general policy that does not describe the business as demolition will not satisfy it. A workers compensation insurance certificate is also required "if you have employees and are not exempt". Both apply to the unrestricted and the restricted licence. NSW · effective 2012-01-01 SafeWork NSW · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: At application and again at renewal. The public liability certificate — and the workers compensation certificate where the applicant has employees and is not exempt — appear in the mandatory document checklist SafeWork NSW publishes for both the unrestricted and restricted demolition licence. Evidence goes to the regulator, not only to a client. NSW · effective 2012-01-01 SafeWork NSW · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: SafeWork NSW, under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) and the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2017 (NSW). Two licence types: an unrestricted demolition licence, needed to demolish or partly demolish any structure, and a restricted demolition licence covering a narrower band of work. Unlike a high-risk work licence, this is a licence to carry out the work as a business, which is why it carries insurance conditions that worker tickets do not. NSW · effective 2012-01-01 SafeWork NSW · 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