Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Demolition contractors: public liability requirements in Victoria

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

Data as at

Verified for Victoria

  • Licence liability condition: Yes — and it is public liability, not professional indemnity, which is the reverse of most registered practitioner classes. Section 136 makes it an offence for a building practitioner other than a builder carrying out domestic building work to work without the required insurance, and the Ministerial Order made under section 135 sets a public liability policy for all three demolisher classes with a limit of indemnity for any one claim during any one period of insurance of not less than $5 million for the low rise and medium rise classes, and not less than $10 million for the unlimited class. Defence costs may sit in addition to the limit, capped at twenty per cent of it per claim. Keep this separate from domestic building insurance, which is a per-project consumer product: its own Ministerial Order expressly excludes a person registered solely in the builder category, class of demolisher. VIC · effective 2026-08-25 Victoria Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: At registration, whether the applicant is covered by the required insurance is the financial probity test for every category other than builder. After that it is annual: on or before each anniversary of registration the practitioner must give the Authority written proof that they will be covered until the next anniversary, with an examination fee accompanying the proof. No automatic suspension provision for failing that was located, so the consequence is disciplinary rather than automatic. VIC · effective 2026-08-25 Victoria Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: Demolishers are registered building practitioners in Victoria, but as a class of the builder category rather than a category of their own: demolisher (low rise buildings), demolisher (medium rise buildings) and demolisher (unlimited). Registration is under Part 11 of the Building Act 1993, administered by the Building and Plumbing Commission as successor to the Victorian Building Authority. 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