Your builder will not fix the defects
They are still trading. They answer sometimes. Nothing gets fixed. This is the most common building problem in the country and the one the insurance was never designed for.
The insurance will not help you here
Every state runs a statutory insurance scheme for residential building work, and almost all of them are last resort cover. They respond when the builder has died, disappeared or become insolvent. South Australia's scheme puts the exclusion in plain words: it does not answer a dispute between you and a builder who is still solvent and trading.
That is worth absorbing before you spend a month on hold. A solvent builder who will not return is not an insurance problem. It is a statutory warranty problem, and the warranty is a promise the builder made by operation of law whether or not the contract mentions it — one that cannot be contracted out of, and that in most states passes to whoever owns the house next.
If your builder has collapsed, this is the wrong page: what to do when a builder goes into liquidation covers that, and the order of steps is different.
How long you have
- Victoria
- up to 10 years to bring a building action — the longest in the country
- NSW
- 6 years for a major defect, 2 years for anything else
- Queensland
- three different clocks, and the shortest one is six months
- WA
- 6 years — but the date it runs from depends on how the work was done
- South Australia
- 5 years, and the court cannot extend it
- Tasmania
- 6 months to fix listed minor defects, and 12 months to claim incomplete work
- ACT
- 6 years structural, 2 years non-structural — on work over $12,000
- NT
- not verified — see the page
Each period was read from that jurisdiction's own government source or Act on 13 October 2026, and each state page names and links the source. Periods and the events they run from both differ — in Western Australia the start date depends on which completion notice was lodged — so read your state's page before counting anything.
The clock started without telling you
Every period on this page runs from an event, not from the day you gave up negotiating. Completion, practical completion, the occupancy permit, the day work stopped, the day the notice was lodged. That date is usually on a document you have never seen, and it has been running while you were being told someone would come next week.
Which produces the single most expensive mistake in this whole area: negotiating through the deadline. A builder who intends to fix the work and a builder who intends to run out your warranty period behave identically for the first several months. You cannot tell them apart by how reasonable they sound, only by what has been repaired.
So put a date on it. Find the completion document, work out when your period ends, and decide now what you will do three months before that — not after. Lodging a complaint or an application does not end the conversation with your builder; it just means the conversation can no longer cost you the claim.
What to do, in order
- 01Write it down, with dates
Every defect, when you first noticed it, and photographs. Several states run their deadline from when you became aware, so the date you first saw something is itself evidence.
- 02Find the completion document
The occupancy permit, certificate of final inspection, or notice of completion. Your period runs from a date on one of these, not from handover day as you remember it.
- 03Put it to the builder in writing
Email, listing the defects, asking for a date. Most regulators require you to have attempted this, and a written request with no reply is worth more later than months of phone calls.
- 04Work out your deadline before you negotiate
Read your state's page below. Diarise the date. Decide in advance what you will do if nothing is fixed by three months before it.
- 05Lodge with the regulator
Each state's building regulator can direct a contractor to rectify defective work. That is a different and usually faster route than a court, and it is the one the statutory scheme is built around.
- 06Get advice if the money is large
Where the rectification cost is significant or the deadline is close, this stops being a consumer process. Legal advice bought early is cheaper than a claim commenced a week late.