Builders are licensed by Consumer, Building and Occupational Services (CBOS) under the Occupational Licensing Act 2005, and anyone can check a licence on its Occupational Licensing online search. The Act's old rule requiring licence numbers in advertisements was repealed from 1 January 2017, as our page for Hobart tradies explains, but a visible number still matters to owners who check. Under the Building Act 2016, notifiable and permit building work must be designed by a designer, carried out by a builder licensed for that work and inspected by a building surveyor, and it's the owner, not the builder, who must engage the building surveyor before notifiable work starts. A line in your process on how you work with the owner's surveyor saves explaining it at every first meeting.
Residential building contracts worth twenty thousand dollars or more come under the Residential Building Work Contracts and Dispute Resolution Act 2016. The contract must be written and signed, state your licence number, set out the statutory warranties and include a plain-language checklist, and the owner must also get the residential building consumer guide. The owner can withdraw within five working days of receiving both the signed contract and the guide. Deposits are capped at 5% of the price from fifty thousand dollars up, 10% below that, and 20% where more than half the work's value is done off site, as with a home built in a factory and delivered. Additions and variations the owner asks for must be written up and signed by both parties before that work starts, and owners have six years from practical completion to bring a claim for breach of a statutory warranty, a benefit later owners can also rely on. Disputes begin with a notice to the Director of Building Control, and since 1 July 2024 the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal deals with the matters the Act sends to it.
Home warranty insurance is the point to be careful with. Parliament passed the Residential Building (Home Warranty Insurance Amendments) Act 2023, but its provisions start on days to be proclaimed, and in October 2026 the version of the contracts Act in force on Tasmanian Legislation Online still did not contain the new insurance part. Until it does, a Hobart builder's site shouldn't promise a home warranty policy. Describe the statutory warranties and any cover you do hold, and if the scheme starts, changing that wording is a text edit on an existing page.
In Hobart itself, the Tasmanian Planning Scheme and the Hobart Local Provisions Schedule have replaced the Hobart Interim Planning Scheme 2015. The change added 42 local heritage places, a historic landscape precinct for the southern Queens Domain and detailed datasheets for each heritage precinct, and introduced a new overlay for potentially flood-prone land; specific area plans such as the Lower Sandy Bay Escarpment plan add rules of their own. Places on the Tasmanian Heritage Register are of state significance, and proposals for them are referred to the Tasmanian Heritage Council. On the slopes, the Landslip Hazard Code overlay sits alongside the A and B landslip areas declared under the Mineral Resources Development Act 1995, and the Building Act 2016 bars erecting, altering or adding to a building in a declared landslip area unless the work is authorised under that Act. Tasmania Fire Service says about 98% of the state's land area is designated bushfire-prone, and our tradies page covers how BAL work should be described. Glenorchy, Clarence and Kingborough are separate planning authorities with their own maps, so check each job against the council it sits in.
Master Builders Tasmania has its head office at Cambridge, and its 2026 Awards for Excellence drew 196 entries. We're an Adelaide team and work with Hobart builders by phone and email, at the same prices as anywhere else. Our current clients are in SA, NSW, VIC and QLD, so the examples below come from Adelaide.
