Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Tilers: 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: 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 "Wall and floor tiling". 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

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