Consulting engineers: public liability requirements in Western Australia

Verified for Western Australia

• Licence liability condition: Yes, and the mechanism is a risk-based self-assessment rather than a prescribed figure. To be approved as a building engineering contractor you must have an appropriate level of professional indemnity insurance as determined under the Board's policy, met either by self-assessing your own risk level and determining adequate cover, or through Professional Standards Scheme membership. WA · effective 2024-07-01 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
• Licence evidence required: The policy certificate number at registration, or evidence of Professional Standards Scheme membership. WA · effective 2024-07-01 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
• Licensing body: The Building Services Board, and only for BUILDING engineers — Western Australia is phasing registration in by discipline rather than applying it to engineering at large. Structural, fire safety and fire systems engineers came in from 1 July 2024 and civil and mechanical building engineers from 1 July 2025, with the scheme becoming mandatory from 1 July 2027. An engineer outside building work is not caught. WA · effective 2024-07-01 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

• 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