Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Tow truck operators: commercial motor requirements in Queensland

Cover for vehicles used for business, including utilities, vans and trucks, and liability for damage they cause.

Data as at

Verified for Queensland

  • Licence liability condition: No insurance condition of any kind — not public liability, not on-hook. This is an unusually strong negative, because it rests on a full-text reading of both instruments rather than on a guidance page failing to mention the topic. The word "insurance" appears in the Act and Regulation only in two unrelated places, both of them RESTRICTIONS rather than requirements: an accredited person must not promote a business providing vehicle insurance or assisting with insurance claims while exercising the accreditation, and consideration must not be given or received for obtaining work in the field of vehicle insurance. Queensland regulates tow operators AWAY from the insurance industry rather than requiring them to carry insurance. THE CROSS-BORDER POINT, and it is a real one: New South Wales DOES require tow truck operators to hold public liability and "on-hook" liability insurance, with certificates per vehicle. On the full text of the governing instruments, that requirement is a New South Wales outlier and does not generalise. An operator who assumes the NSW rule applies interstate is buying cover nobody is asking for; an operator moving the other way is losing cover they had. QLD · effective 2025-01-10 WorkSafe Queensland · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: None. There is no insurance requirement to evidence. QLD · effective 2025-01-10 WorkSafe Queensland · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, under the Tow Truck Act 2023 (Qld) and the Tow Truck Regulation 2024 (Qld). Queensland ACCREDITS rather than licenses: "A person must not carry on a towing business unless the person holds a towing operator accreditation for the business", with separate accreditations for drivers and assistants. QLD · effective 2025-01-10 WorkSafe Queensland · 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