Consulting engineers: professional indemnity requirements in Queensland

Verified for Queensland

• Licence liability condition: Yes, expressed as a reasonable-steps duty rather than a fixed minimum: a registered professional engineer must take all reasonable steps to procure and maintain professional indemnity insurance during each year that is appropriate for the services being provided. "Appropriate for the services" means the adequacy question is answered against the work, not against a number. QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland · 2026-08-24
• Licence evidence required: Evidence that reasonable steps have been taken to procure and maintain cover appropriate to the services provided. QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland · 2026-08-24
• Licensing body: The Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland, through the Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ) scheme — and the SCOPE is the point. Any engineer wanting to undertake professional engineering services in Queensland, or FOR Queensland, is legally required to register. That is engineering generally, not merely engineering on certain buildings, which makes it far broader than the New South Wales scheme and the reason RPEQ is the registration most Australian engineers have heard of. QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland · 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

• NSW Government — NSW — design and building practitioner registration
• Victoria Government — Victoria — consolidated legislation
• Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland — BPEQ — registered professional engineers of Queensland
• 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