Maintaining your building practitioner registration

Find out what's required to maintain your building practitioner credentials, including complying with the code of practice and obligations for Continuing Professional Development (CPD), record keeping and more.

On this page

Building practitioners have additional obligations under the legislation to maintain their registration. These are outlined below.

Code of practice

Building practitioners must comply with a code of practice that sets out required professional and ethical standards. The code includes the duty to:

  • act in a professional manner
  • act within their level of competence and expertise
  • maintain satisfactory level of competence
  • avoid conflicts of interest
  • maintain confidentiality.

The code of practice is in Schedule 4 of the Design and Building Practitioners Regulation 2021.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

Building practitioners with a licence or certificate under the Home Building Act 1989 must:

  • complete at least three hours of continuing professional development for each year of registration
  • keep written records for five years that specify how you met the CPD requirement for each year of registration.

Building practitioners without a home building licence must:

  • complete 12 CPD points
  • complete at least three hours of continuing professional development for each year of registration.

Courses are available from the Construct NSW Digital Learning Platform.

Download the CPD guidelines for more information to help you meet your requirements.

Record keeping

Building practitioners must:

  • Keep records for at least 10 years from the date the building work was completed. This continues to apply even if the practitioner ceases to be a prescribed practitioner.
  • Keep a record of each project for building work for which a compliance declaration was issued. The record must include:
    • the number of compliance declarations provided by the practitioner
    • the class of building
    • the name of the developer in relation to the work and the developer's place of business
    • the name of the local government area in which the project is located
    • the address of the project including the lot and deposited plan number
    • the name of the person who engaged the practitioner
    • the name of the owner of the land or premises
    • the name and registration number of other registered practitioner involved in the project.
  • Keep copies of:
    • a regulated design for which a design compliance declaration was provided by the practitioner
    • the design compliance declaration provided by the practitioner.

More information about record keeping is published in Part 7 of the Design and Building Practitioners Regulation 2021.

Insurance

The exemption for registered building practitioners to hold adequate professional indemnity insurance has been extended by 12 months to 1 July 2026.  

Auditing of building practitioners

Our audits of building practitioners help to build trust in the building and construction industry.

The audit focuses on a practitioner's compliance and on their conduct as well as projects with high complexity or the potential to impact a large number of people.

We will use complaints data and other intelligence about practitioner conduct to choose our targets for audits.

Our audit process, risk analysis framework, audit outcomes and regulator activities after an audit are detailed in our audit strategy.

Learn more about our strategy for auditing building practitioners.

NSW Planning Portal online training and resources

If you would like help with using the NSW Planning Portal, online training sessions are available.

Contact us

For questions related to the requirements under the Design and Building Practitioner scheme, contact Building Commission NSW on 13 27 00.

You can also contact Service NSW to ask a question, report an issue or give feedback.

For questions related to lodging documents on the NSW Planning Portal:

Download as PDF Print this page
Top of page