What the Design and Building Practitioners Act means for your strata building — duties, deadlines, penalties and who pays. Written for owners corporation committees.
Your strata manager forwards a quote and mentions the works need to be "DBP compliant." No one explains what that means, who it binds, or what happens if it is ignored — and the committee has to vote on the levy next month. This guide sets out what the Design and Building Practitioners Act actually requires, written for the people signing the contract rather than the people holding the licence.
The Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 is NSW legislation introduced after a run of high-profile apartment defect failures exposed how little of the design and construction chain was documented or accountable. It does two separate things, and committees routinely only hear about one of them.
First, it creates a registration and declaration regime. Anyone designing or building regulated work has to be registered, the design has to be documented and declared before work starts, and the completed work has to be declared as compliant at the end — all lodged on a government portal.
Second, it creates a statutory duty of care owed directly to building owners. That is the part with the most money attached to it, and the part most committees have never been told about.
Under the older system, an owners corporation discovering defects five years after a repair had a difficult path: chase the builder under contract, hope the entity still existed, and argue about who caused what. The DBP Act changes the position in three practical ways.
It creates a government-held record. Regulated designs and compliance declarations are lodged on the NSW Planning Portal. If a defect emerges later, there is an auditable trail showing what was specified, who designed it, who built it and what they declared. That record survives the contractor.
It narrows the contractor field to accountable parties. A registered practitioner has something to lose. An unregistered one working outside the scheme has already demonstrated their attitude to the rules.
And it gives your owners corporation a direct statutory claim that does not depend on the contract you signed.
Section 37 of the DBP Act imposes a duty on anyone who carries out construction work to exercise reasonable care to avoid economic loss caused by defects. The duty is owed to the owner of the land and to each subsequent owner — which includes owners corporations, and includes owners who bought after the work was done.
Three features make it unusually useful:
Note this sits alongside, not instead of, the statutory warranties under the Home Building Act 1989 — six years for major defects and two years for other defects. Different mechanisms, different limits. If your building is dealing with defects, the sequencing of which claim to run is a question for your strata lawyer, and it is worth asking before you spend money rectifying.
The scheme applies to regulated buildings — Class 2, and certain Class 3 and 9c buildings, including mixed-use buildings with a Class 2, 3 or 9c part. Class 2 is apartment and unit blocks. Class 3 covers boarding houses, hostels, student accommodation, hotels and motels. Class 9c covers residential aged care.
The dates matter, because they moved during 2026 and a lot of published advice is now out of date:
| What | When it applies |
| Remedial work on Class 2 buildings | Regulated since 1 July 2021 — applies today |
| Remedial work on Class 3 and 9c buildings | Deferred to 1 July 2028 |
| Mandatory professional indemnity insurance for registered building practitioners | From 1 July 2027 (exemption extended to 30 June 2027) |
| Strata building bond increase from 2% to 3% of contract price | Deferred to 1 July 2028 — the bond stays at 2% for now |
If you manage a Class 2 residential strata scheme, the deferrals change nothing for you. Your building has been inside the scheme since 2021. If you manage a Class 3 or 9c building, you have breathing room until 2028 — the detail is in our note on the deferral of the Class 3 and 9c extension.
For regulated remedial work, the sequence is fixed. Your committee should be able to point to each step.
The practical implication for budgeting: the design practitioner is a real, separately-paid role, and it is not the same person as your builder. If a quote arrives with no allowance for regulated design, either the contractor has assumed your engineer is doing it, or they have not priced the compliance at all. Establish which before you compare prices — our guide on what happens after your engineer's report arrives sets out how the roles fit together.
Not everything on a strata building is regulated work, and overstating the scope wastes money as surely as understating it.
Exempt development is excluded. Some remedial building work is declared exempt development under the State Environmental Planning Policy because of its minor impact, and is excluded from the DBP scheme.
Waterproofing is only sometimes excluded. Under clause 13 of the DBP Regulation, waterproofing escapes the scheme only if it meets all three conditions: it results from alterations to a bathroom, kitchen, laundry or toilet; it relates to a single dwelling; and it is exempt development. Common-property balcony, planter or roof waterproofing does not qualify. Treat it as regulated work.
Emergency remedial work has a different path. Where work genuinely meets the emergency criteria, it can proceed without the designs being lodged first — but the building practitioner must still provide a building compliance declaration to Building Commission NSW, and the Commission audits emergency claims. A membrane at end of life causing minor leakage is the Commission's own example of work that is not an emergency.
Buildings outside the regulated classes. A commercial office block or a standalone house is not covered.
Five checks, none of which need a lawyer:
Building Commission NSW audits remedial projects and has real powers. Where work is non-compliant it can issue formal warnings, a Building Work Rectification Order, a Stop Work Order or a Prohibition Order, and impose financial penalties.
For an owners corporation, the exposure is rarely the penalty. It is the stop-work order landing mid-program with scaffold already erected and levies already raised, the rectification order requiring compliant work to be redone, the questions from an insurer, and the gap in the record when a lot owner sells and their purchaser's solicitor asks for the compliance documentation.
The cost of doing it correctly — a properly registered design, a lodgement, a declaration — is a small fraction of the cost of doing it twice. That is the whole argument for the framework, and it is the reason committees who understand it stop treating the cheapest quote as the best one. Where responsibility for those costs sits between the owners corporation and individual lot owners is a separate question, covered in our guide on who pays for remedial work in a strata building.
If it is a Class 2 residential apartment building — or a mixed-use building with a Class 2 part — then yes, and it has since 1 July 2021. Remedial work on Class 3 and 9c buildings is not regulated until 1 July 2028.
There is no dollar threshold. What matters is whether the work is regulated building work on a regulated building. Some minor work is excluded as exempt development, but most common-property concrete, structural, facade and waterproofing work is regulated regardless of contract value.
The registered building practitioner. They lodge the regulated designs and design compliance declarations before work starts and the building compliance declaration at the end. The final building compliance declaration cannot be delegated. Ask for the lodgement reference and keep it.
Section 37 imposes a duty of care to avoid economic loss caused by defects, owed to the owner of the land and each subsequent owner, and an owners corporation is taken to suffer economic loss where it bears rectification costs. Whether a claim is available in your circumstances depends on the facts and the limitation periods — this is general information, not legal advice, so get your strata lawyer to assess it.
Not yet. The exemption was extended to 30 June 2027, so PI insurance becomes mandatory for registered building practitioners from 1 July 2027. Many established remedial contractors already carry it.
Partly. The extension to remedial work on Class 3 and 9c buildings was deferred to 1 July 2028, the professional indemnity insurance requirement to 1 July 2027, and the strata building bond increase to 1 July 2028. Class 2 obligations were unaffected.
The DBP Act is not the obstacle it gets described as. It is a documentation standard that happens to be law, and buildings that follow it end up with a record they can rely on and repairs that hold.
Atomic Projects has delivered regulated remedial work on Sydney Class 2 buildings since the scheme began — defect rectification, concrete and structural repair, facade remediation and waterproofing, with registered designs, portal lodgements and audit-ready documentation as part of the job rather than an afterthought. See how we work as a Class 2 registered building practitioner, or book a free assessment and we will walk your committee through what compliance actually looks like on your scope.
Send photos, the engineer's report, or just the symptoms — whatever you've got. A registered builder reads it and calls you back. No call centre, no obligation.