How to verify a subcontractor’s licence in NSW (without waiting on hold)

Every general contractor in NSW is expected to confirm that the trades on their site actually hold a current, valid licence for the work they’re doing — not just a licence, but the right class of licence, still active, not suspended or cancelled. In practice, this check gets done once at onboarding and then forgotten, because there’s no reminder built into anyone’s calendar for "recheck this in eleven months."

What actually needs checking

NSW Fair Trading maintains the register that covers most trade licences relevant to construction — electrical, plumbing, building, and several others. The three things worth confirming for every subcontractor are: the licence number matches the person or business actually on site, the licence class covers the specific work being done (a general building licence doesn’t cover electrical work, for instance), and the licence hasn’t lapsed, been suspended, or been cancelled since you last looked.

The naive way to do this is a manual lookup on the government portal every time someone joins a project. It works, but it doesn’t scale past a handful of trades, and nobody goes back and rechecks licences that were valid six months ago but might not be today.

Why expiry dates alone aren’t enough

A licence expiring in three months looks fine today, but if your project runs for four months, that subcontractor will be working without a valid licence for the last month of the job — and nobody notices until the licence has already lapsed. The useful check isn’t "is this valid right now," it’s "will this stay valid for the length of time this person needs to be on my site." That’s a timeline comparison, not a point-in-time check, and it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to automate and tedious to track by hand across more than one or two projects.

Automating the recheck

Novato verifies NSW trade licences directly against the live government register when a subcontractor uploads their details, and flags anything expiring before your project’s own end date — not just anything expired today. If you’re running more than a couple of active projects at once, that’s the difference between finding out about a lapsed licence from a phone call on-site versus a dashboard alert two weeks before it becomes a problem.