How to check a builder is registered in Australia

01The 60 second version

If you read nothing else on this page, read this.

The regulator puts it more bluntly than we would. Victoria's Building and Plumbing Commission tells homeowners exactly what not to rely on:

02Find the register for your state

Building regulation is a state responsibility, so there is no national register. There are nine.

Every link below was fetched and confirmed working on 15 August 2026. That sounds like a small thing to mention. It is not. When we started building this page we worked from a list of register URLs compiled a day earlier, and five of the nine were already dead. Regulator websites move constantly, and most pages telling you to check the register were written years ago and have never been tested since.

Every one of these was opened and confirmed working on 15 August 2026. They open in a new tab so you can keep this page beside them.

Two things to know before you search. First, the terminology differs. Victoria and the Northern Territory speak of registration. New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania speak of a licence. They do the same job. Second, the dollar threshold above which registration is required is different in every state, and this page does not state the figure for yours, because we have only verified Victoria's against the legislation itself. Your regulator's page will tell you. Do not take a number from a blog, including this one, without checking it.

For Victoria the trigger is set out in the regulations, and it is lower than most people expect:

03What registration actually proves

And the three things it does not prove, which matter more.

A search result showing current registration tells you four useful things. The person has met a qualification and experience standard. They are permitted to do a defined class of work. They are answerable to a regulator. And they exist, under that name, as a real legal entity you could pursue.

The Victorian regulator sets out what its search will show you, and the third item on its list is the one people skip:

Now the three things it does not prove.

None of this is an argument for skipping the check. It is an argument for knowing what the check is worth. A register search rules out the catastrophic case, the person who was never entitled to touch your house at all. It does not tell you whether the roof will leak. Nothing on a screen does that, which is the honest reason independent inspection exists.

04The check almost nobody makes

The disciplinary register is a separate search. Most people never run it.

In Victoria it is called the Compliance and Enforcement Register. Older articles, and a lot of advice still circulating, call it the disciplinary register. It records what happened when a practitioner was found to have broken the rules:

Search it at the Compliance and Enforcement Register. In other states the equivalent information is folded into the licence search itself. New South Wales, for instance, discloses public warnings, finalised disciplinary action and whether insurance claims have been paid on that contractor's work, all within the one result.

Two limits on the Victorian register, quoted directly, because they change how you read a clean result.

Put those two sentences together and you have the most useful fact on this page. A blank result on the Victorian disciplinary register means no recorded finding, within a window that starts in 2018 or 2019 and rolls forward five years at a time. It is a real check and worth running every time. It is not a background check on somebody's whole working life, and nobody should treat it as one.

If the name does return a result, read it properly rather than panicking. There is a difference between a builder who was fined for a paperwork failure and one found no longer fit to practise. The register says which.

05Make sure it is the same person

A register search is only as good as the name you typed into it.

This is the failure the register cannot catch on its own, and it is more common than it sounds. You search a business name, you get a clean result, and you relax. But the name on the ad, the name on the quote, the name on the bank transfer and the name on the register can be four different things, and only one of them is the one the regulator actually knows about.

We published a case in which a Melbourne woman was convicted twice and fined $170,000 while trading under four different names. Not four businesses. Four names, one person, and three homeowners who each thought they had checked.

If that last one sounds far fetched, it is the single most useful phone call available to you and it costs nothing. The register lists the registered practitioner. If the person standing in your driveway is relying on somebody else's registration, the person who actually holds it will tell you so immediately.

06The insurance check

Registration and insurance are separate obligations, and you can verify both.

Above a threshold, a builder doing domestic work must take out insurance that protects you, not them. It is the cover that responds if the builder dies, disappears, becomes insolvent or has their registration cancelled, and it is the reason an insolvency does not automatically end a homeowner's options.

The certificate should be issued in your name, for your address, before the work starts. You do not have to take the builder's word that it exists.

While you are checking the money side, there is a rule in Victoria worth knowing because breaching it is a strong early signal. The deposit is capped by statute:

07What to do if they are not registered

Two situations, and they need different things.

If you have not signed anything. Stop there. You have lost nothing except a quote, and a quote is worth less than the problem you have just avoided. There is no version of this where an unregistered person is the right choice for work that requires registration, however good the price is. The price is the bait, and in both prosecutions we have written up the quoted figure was well under what the work should have cost.

If work has already started, or money has already moved. This is more common, and it is recoverable more often than people fear. In rough order:

One expectation worth setting honestly. A prosecution punishes the offender; it does not repay you. In the Belgrave matter the court imposed a $70,000 fine, which is payable to the state. The homeowner had separately been awarded $55,000 in damages at the tribunal, and at the time of the prosecution that money had never been paid. Enforcement and compensation run on different tracks, and winning one does not deliver the other.

08How this goes wrong in practice

Two prosecutions we have written up. Same method, different people.

In the first, a woman advertising under four different names was convicted twice and fined $170,000. Three homeowners made contact through Facebook. Each of them believed they had engaged a builder.

In the second, an Officer man was convicted and fined $70,000 over an unregistered renovation at a Belgrave home. He answered a homeowner's Facebook post, told her a building permit was not required, and asked for a fifty per cent deposit when the legal maximum was five. She paid $43,000. Site Inspections carried out the independent inspection in that matter and wrote the report; we found fourteen non-compliant items and four safety hazards, and we referred the matter to the regulator.

The pattern is the same in both, and it is worth stating plainly because it is what a register check catches. Contact begins through an ad or a social media reply rather than a referral. The quote is attractive. The homeowner is told a permit is not needed. A large deposit is requested early. Nobody searches a register, because at no point does anything feel like the kind of transaction that requires one.

Two minutes at the start of that sequence ends it. The Court of Appeal has since confirmed how much can turn on it: in one case a builder who took part of the price in cash was ordered to repay it, and was held entitled to nothing for stages that were never complete.

09Sources

Every register link on this page was fetched and confirmed working on 15 August 2026. Regulator addresses move; if one has broken since, search the regulator's name and tell us.