Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Security guards: 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 for some classes and no for others, which is the detail that gets missed. A master licence holder must have and maintain at least $10 million in public liability insurance cover IF it intends to provide Class 1D (guard dog handler) or Class 1F (armed guard) operatives. A master licence supplying only unarmed guards without dogs does not trigger it. The requirement follows the risk of the activity, not the fact of being in the security industry. NSW · effective 1998-04-01 NSW Police Force — Security Licensing & Enforcement Directorate · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: Evidence that the applicant has obtained the public liability insurance required by the Regulation, where it applies to that applicant. Because the trigger is the class of operative supplied, adding an armed or dog-handling class to an existing master licence is what turns the requirement on. NSW · effective 1998-04-01 NSW Police Force — Security Licensing & Enforcement Directorate · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: The NSW Police Force, through the Security Licensing & Enforcement Directorate, under the Security Industry Act 1997 (NSW). Two licences work together: a MASTER licence for the business supplying security operatives, and an individual licence for each operative, classed by the activity. NSW · effective 1998-04-01 NSW Police Force — Security Licensing & Enforcement Directorate · 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