How to verify a subcontractor’s electrical licence in Victoria (REC vs. individual licences explained)

Every general contractor in Victoria is expected to confirm that the electrical trades on their site are properly licensed for the work they’re doing — and Victoria is one of the few states where that’s genuinely two separate checks, not one. Energy Safe Victoria (ESV) regulates both a business’s registration to carry out electrical contracting work and an individual’s licence to actually perform it, and a document that satisfies one doesn’t say anything about the other.

REC and an electrician’s licence are not the same document

A Registered Electrical Contractor (REC) is a business-level registration — it confirms the company is registered to take on electrical contracting work, employ electricians, and carry the liability that comes with running that kind of business. It says nothing about which individual is actually on your site doing the work.

An Electrician’s Licence (or a Restricted Electrical Worker’s Licence, for narrower classes of work) is the individual’s own qualification to perform electrical work at all. A subcontracting company can hold a perfectly current REC while employing someone whose personal licence has lapsed — and checking the company’s REC number tells you nothing about that. The two need to be verified separately, against separate registers, for separate parties: the business, and the specific person standing on your site.

Why one of these checks is easier to automate than the other

ESV publishes REC data in a form that can actually be checked against systematically — a registration number, a business name, a status, an expiry. Individual worker licences (the Electrician’s Licence itself) aren’t published the same way; ESV’s own public search tool is the only way to check one, and it has to be searched by hand, one licence at a time, with no bulk or automated lookup available. That’s not a product gap — it’s genuinely how ESV publishes the two datasets today.

Worth knowing if you’re relying on an automated check anywhere: "verified against the register" for a VIC electrical document usually means the REC side got checked against real data, while the individual licence side still needs a human to actually open ESV’s search tool and look. Don’t assume both halves got the same level of scrutiny just because one of them did.

A REC snapshot can miss a recently issued registration

Even on the REC side, worth knowing exactly what you’re checking against: unless a system is querying ESV live for every single check, it’s working off a periodically refreshed snapshot of the public register, not a real-time feed. A REC number issued or renewed since the last refresh simply won’t be in that snapshot yet — which reads as "not found," not as "invalid." Treat a snapshot miss as "not yet confirmed," not as a red flag on its own, and check the current listing on ESV’s own register before rejecting anything on that basis alone.

How Novato handles this

Novato checks Victorian REC numbers against a regularly refreshed register snapshot, clearly separates it from the individual Electrician’s Licence (which deep-links straight to ESV’s own search tool, since no bulk data exists to check it against automatically), and flags a REC snapshot miss as "verify manually" rather than a silent fail — so a reviewer always knows which half of a VIC electrical document has actually been checked against real data, and which still needs a human look.