How to verify a subcontractor’s licence in QLD (the QBCC register explained)

Every general contractor in QLD is expected to confirm that the trades on their site hold a current QBCC licence for the work they’re actually doing — not just a licence, but a class that covers that specific work, still active rather than suspended or cancelled. As with most states, this check tends to happen once at onboarding and then never again, because nothing on anyone’s calendar says "recheck this before the job wraps up."

What the QBCC register actually covers

The Queensland Building and Construction Commission’s licensed contractor register is broader than a lot of GCs assume — it isn’t scoped to one trade or to builders specifically. It’s a single open register covering builder licences, electrical, plumbing and drainage, gasfitting, and every other QBCC-regulated contractor class, all searchable by licence number in one place.

The three things worth confirming for every subcontractor are the same as anywhere else: the licence number actually belongs to the person or business on site, the licence class covers the specific work being done (a general building licence doesn’t cover gasfitting, for instance), and the licence hasn’t lapsed, been suspended, or been cancelled since you last checked. One quirk worth knowing if you’re checking manually: the published register only lists Active and Suspended licences — a Cancelled licence simply doesn’t appear in a search at all, rather than showing up flagged as cancelled. If a licence number returns nothing, that’s not necessarily a typo.

One licence number can cover more than one trade

This is the part that actually trips people up on a manual check: a QBCC licence number isn’t always tied to a single class. A subcontractor licensed for both plumbing and gasfitting, for example, holds both under the same licence number — not two separate ones. Search that number and the register will return a row for each class they hold.

The practical risk is stopping at the first result. If a subby tells you they’re licensed for two types of work on your job and you only check whichever class happens to come back first in the register, you can walk away thinking they’re covered for both when you’ve only actually confirmed one. Worth checking every class listed against that licence number, not just the first one you see — especially for a trade doing genuinely mixed-scope work on site.

Why expiry dates alone aren’t enough

A licence that’s valid today isn’t the same question as a licence that’ll still be valid when the job actually finishes. If your project runs another three months and a subcontractor’s licence is due for renewal in six weeks, they’ll be working unlicensed for the back half of the job unless someone catches it ahead of time — and QBCC’s register is a snapshot, not a live feed with reminders built in. That’s a timeline comparison against your own project’s end date, not a one-off point-in-time check, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to automate and tedious to track by hand once you’re running more than a project or two at once.

Automating the recheck

Novato checks QBCC-licensed trades directly against the same open register when a subcontractor uploads their details, surfaces every class held under that licence number rather than just one, and flags anything expiring before your project’s own end date — not just anything already expired. If you’re juggling more than a couple of active QLD projects, that’s the difference between finding out about a lapsed or single-class-only licence from a phone call on-site versus a dashboard alert with enough runway to actually do something about it.