Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Property managers: professional indemnity requirements in Australian Capital Territory

Cover for legal liability arising from professional advice or services, written on a claims-made basis.

Data as at

Verified for Australian Capital Territory

  • Licence liability condition: No insurance requirement — a full-text reading of the whole Act returned ZERO occurrences of the word "insurance". The ACT runs a CONSUMER COMPENSATION FUND kept and administered by the director-general, made up of interest paid on trust accounts. THE THING NOBODY EXPLAINS: Australia protects the clients of real estate agents in TWO fundamentally different ways, and which one you live under decides whether you need professional indemnity insurance at all. Some jurisdictions require the AGENT to carry PI. Others require no insurance whatsoever and instead run a STATUTORY FUND — financed by the interest earned on agents' trust accounts — that compensates clients directly when an agent misuses trust money. New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory take the insurance route. Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT take the fund route. Queensland sits between them. An agent moving state does not merely face a different limit; they face a different mechanism. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 Australian Capital Territory Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: None. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 Australian Capital Territory Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: In ACT, property management is NOT a separate licence — the ACT lists "managing property under a lease" as one of the real estate agent services. The phrase "property manager" does not appear anywhere in the Act. ACROSS AUSTRALIA: six of seven jurisdictions fold property management into the real estate agent licence; only South Australia and Tasmania name it separately, and even they do so under the same Act rather than a separate statute. Anyone hunting for a standalone "property manager licence" is usually looking for something that does not exist. ACT · effective 2026-08-24 Australian Capital Territory 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