Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Real estate agents: public liability requirements in Queensland

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

Data as at

Verified for Queensland

  • Licence liability condition: Not in practice, though the Act leaves the door open. Section 54(2)(b) provides that "A condition may require a licensee to hold insurance of a kind and in an amount prescribed under a regulation" — an enabling power, not a requirement. A full-text reading of the Property Occupations Regulation 2014 found ZERO occurrences of "insurance", so nothing has been prescribed and no condition currently applies. Queensland therefore runs on its statutory CLAIM FUND, established under the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld). Watch the regulation rather than the Act: a future amendment could switch this on without Parliament sitting. 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. QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Queensland Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: None currently prescribed. QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Queensland Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: The Office of Fair Trading, under the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld). QLD · effective 2026-08-24 Queensland 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