Home › Licences

Who is legally allowed to remove asbestos

This is the question everything else leads to, and the one where guessing is most expensive. The answer is set by your state or territory, not by a national rule.

Two licence classes, and a homeowner exception that varies

('

Australian asbestos work is licensed in two classes. A Class A licence covers friable asbestos — any amount of it — and also covers everything a Class B licence does. A Class B licence covers bonded asbestos above the small-quantity threshold. Friable work additionally requires air monitoring by a licensed asbestos assessor who is independent of the removalist, and a clearance before anyone returns.

Sitting underneath the licence system is the exception that generates most of the confusion: in a domestic setting, an owner-occupier is generally permitted to remove a small quantity of bonded asbestos from their own home without a licence, subject to conditions on method, protection, containment and disposal. The widely quoted figure for that threshold is 10 square metres — but the exact limit, the conditions attached, and whether notification is required are set by the WHS regulator in each state and territory, and they are not identical. Check your own jurisdiction before relying on any number, including that one.

Two things are never inside the exception, anywhere. Friable asbestos is always Class A work, regardless of quantity — there is no small-amount allowance for loose-fill, lagging or degraded material. And nothing on this site will tell you how to cut, drill, grind, sand or pressure-clean material that may contain asbestos, because those are the specific actions that turn a stable product into an exposure.

If you take one thing from this section: the legal question and the safety question have the same answer far more often than people expect. Where the law stops a homeowner, it is usually stopping them at the point where the job stops being controllable.

', 0)

Licences guides

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.