Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Painters: public liability requirements in Australia

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

Data as at

Verified requirements, by state

  • Licence liability condition: No public liability condition attaches to the licence. NSW Fair Trading's insurance guidance for building and trade licences does not name public liability insurance as a condition of holding a contractor licence or tradesperson certificate. The insurance that is mandatory is Home Building Compensation (HBC) cover, required for each home building project over $20,000 including GST where the work is residential building work (Home Building Act 1989 s.8A; prescribed amount set at $20,000 on and from 1 March 2015 by the Home Building Regulation 2014). The published exemptions are structural rather than trade-specific — contracts under $20,000, built-in furniture, build-to-rent, recognised housing providers, buildings rising more than three storeys containing multiple home units, work for public sector agencies relying on s.103E, certain retirement villages, and special exemptions approved under s.97 before work starts. Public liability cover is routinely required by head contractors, principals and site access conditions — but as a contract term, not as a licensing requirement. This is a verified negative established from the absence of any public liability condition in the licensing guidance, not from an express statement that none applies. NSW · effective 2015-03-01 Building Commission NSW · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: Evidence is given to the client before money changes hands, not to the regulator at licensing. Where the work is residential building work over $20,000 including GST, the contractor must provide the certificate of Home Building Compensation cover to the developer, homeowner or owner-builder before starting work and before taking any payment, including the deposit. NSW Fair Trading directs homeowners to check that a business holds valid cover before paying anything, and publishes an HBC Check tool for verifying a certificate independently. NSW · effective 2015-03-01 Building Commission NSW · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: NSW Fair Trading, under the Home Building Act 1989 (NSW). NSW licenses this work under Trade work as "Painting". A contractor licence is required for residential building or trade work valued above the prescribed amount of $5,000 in labour and materials including GST (Home Building Regulation 2014, Schedule 1 clause 2(3)(a)). Note the contrast with NSW's Specialist work categories — air conditioning and refrigeration, electrical, medical gas and mechanical services, and plumbing, draining and gasfitting — which require a licence regardless of the cost of the work, with no threshold at all. NSW · effective 2015-01-15 Building Commission NSW · 2026-08-13
  • Licence liability condition: No insurance condition where the work is done unregistered under the single-task exemption, because there is no registration for a condition to attach to. Where the business IS registered in a Domestic Builder (Limited) class, the domestic building warranty scheme applies to eligible domestic building work. Note what is NOT insurance here: Victoria's Minimum Financial Requirements are a SOLVENCY test — net tangible assets against approved workload — and from 1 July 2026 they replace the old Domestic Building Insurance eligibility assessment. MFR is about whether a builder can carry the work financially, not about whether anyone is insured. Confusing the two is easy and gets the answer wrong. VIC · effective 2026-08-24 Building and Plumbing Commission · 2026-08-17
  • Licence evidence required: Nothing where the single-task exemption applies. Where registered, evidence of warranty-product eligibility and Minimum Financial Requirements compliance before registration is issued or renewed. VIC · effective 2026-08-24 Building and Plumbing Commission · 2026-08-17
  • Licensing body: It depends on how the work is contracted, and Victoria draws the line in an unusual place. A painting business can register with the Building and Plumbing Commission in the matching Domestic Builder (Limited) class — but registration is NOT required where the practitioner is only carrying out one task, regardless of the cost of that work. Victoria's own guidance names painting, plastering and tiling as examples. So a single-trade painting contractor may lawfully work unregistered on jobs that would require a licence in New South Wales. VIC · effective 2026-08-24 Building and Plumbing Commission · 2026-08-17
  • Licence liability condition: Yes, through the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme — and Queensland's threshold is the outlier in Australia. Cover is mandatory for residential construction work valued at more than $3,300, against $20,000 in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. A job too small to trigger any warranty obligation interstate can trigger one in Queensland. Public liability, by contrast, is a contract requirement rather than a statutory condition of a QBCC trade licence. QLD · effective 1991-12-01 WorkSafe Queensland · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: The contractor pays the premium before the earlier of two points: work starting, or ten business days after the contract is signed. The obligation is on the contractor to pay it, not on the homeowner to arrange it, and it is time-bound from signing rather than from commencement. QLD · effective 1991-12-01 WorkSafe Queensland · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: The Queensland Building and Construction Commission (QBCC), under the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991. QBCC licence classes are narrow and specific rather than broad. The relevant credential is a painting and decorating trade licence, covering applying paint, texture coatings and wallpaper. QLD · effective 1991-12-01 WorkSafe Queensland · 2026-08-13
  • Licence liability condition: No insurance condition found in the published registration requirements for painters. Home indemnity insurance attaches to residential building work over its own threshold rather than to the painting registration. Recorded as a verified negative against published guidance, not against the full regulations. WA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer Protection WA · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: None found for the registration itself. WA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer Protection WA · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: The Building Services Board, under the Building Services (Registration) Act 2011 (WA) — and Western Australia is unusual in registering painters at all, at a strikingly low threshold. Painting work valued over $1,000 within the Board's jurisdiction requires registration, against the $5,000 building-trade threshold that applies in New South Wales. WA · effective 2012-06-29 Consumer Protection WA · 2026-08-13
  • Licence liability condition: No separate trade licence exists to carry a condition. Where a building work contractor's licence applies to the job, yes, through building indemnity insurance. It is required for domestic building work that must be approved by council and costs $20,000 or more. What makes South Australia distinctive is the stop rule: building work cannot start until the builder has taken out the insurance AND both the owner and the council have received a copy of the certificate of insurance. Two recipients, not one. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: Nothing for the trade itself. Where building indemnity insurance applies, before work commences and to both the owner and the council. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: Not separately licensed as a trade. South Australia licenses the CONTRACTOR rather than the trade: a building work contractor's licence from Consumer and Business Services covers those who carry out or arrange building work for others, and trades doing "specified building work" fall inside that regime rather than holding a licence of their own. The full statutory definition of specified building work could not be retrieved, so which trades it names is not established here. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13
  • Licence liability condition: No licence exists to carry an insurance condition. Any cover is driven by contracts, principals and the business's own risk appetite rather than by a regulator. TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer, Building and Occupational Services Tasmania · 2026-08-25
  • Licence evidence required: None to a regulator, because there is no regulator of the occupation. TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer, Building and Occupational Services Tasmania · 2026-08-25
  • Licensing body: Nobody. Tasmania's guidance is direct: "Painters and decorators are among the occupations that are not regulated in Tasmania and do not require an occupational licence." The trade is unregulated as an occupation. TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer, Building and Occupational Services Tasmania · 2026-08-25
  • Licence liability condition: No licence exists to carry an insurance condition. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 ACT Construction Occupations Registrar · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: None to a regulator. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 ACT Construction Occupations Registrar · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: Nobody, at present. The ACT's own material states: "Painter licensing is not currently required in the ACT." The territory has consulted on extending trade licensing, so this is a position that may change rather than a settled one — check the current status before relying on it for a decision. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 ACT Construction Occupations Registrar · 2026-08-13
  • Licence liability condition: No licence exists to carry an insurance condition. Cover comes from contracts and from the head builder's fidelity fund obligations on prescribed residential work, not from any licence held by the trade. NT · effective 2026-08-24 NT Building Practitioners Board · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: None to a regulator. NT · effective 2026-08-24 NT Building Practitioners Board · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: Nobody. The Northern Territory licenses fewer building trades than any other jurisdiction, and its own guidance states that the only building industry tradespersons who need to be licensed in the NT are electricians and plumbers. Carpentry and painting are unregulated occupations there. NT · effective 2026-08-24 NT Building Practitioners Board · 2026-08-13

By state and territory

Licensing is a state matter, so the requirement behind this cover changes at the border. These pages track the licence question in each jurisdiction.

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