Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Consulting engineers: 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, within that building scope, and since a specific date: mandatory insurance became a requirement for all professional engineers undertaking professional engineering work on regulated buildings from 1 July 2022. A registered professional engineer must not carry out the work unless adequately insured with respect to it — meaning indemnified by insurance complying with the regulations against liability arising from the work. Adequacy is assessed against the work rather than fixed at a published figure. NSW · effective 2022-07-01 NSW Government · 2026-08-25
  • Licence evidence required: At registration and continuously thereafter. Because the rule is framed as a prohibition on carrying out the work while uninsured rather than as a document to file, the practical obligation is to maintain cover matched to the work being done, and to be able to show it. NSW · effective 2022-07-01 NSW Government · 2026-08-25
  • Licensing body: Registration under the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (NSW) — but READ THE SCOPE CAREFULLY, because it is narrower than "engineers must be registered in NSW". Registration is required to do professional engineering work, which can include giving advice, on a REGULATED BUILDING: currently class 2, class 3 and class 9c buildings, including mixed-use buildings with such a part. Engineering work outside that building scope is not caught by this registration. This is also a different scheme from Queensland's RPEQ, which registers professional engineers across engineering generally. NSW · effective 2020-07-01 NSW Government · 2026-08-25

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