The Federal Government has finished the legislative work to fund free online access to Australian Standards written into law. The fix is welcome. The harder question is why it took the best part of twenty years.

If you wire a house, plumb a bathroom or frame a wall, the law tells you which Australian Standard to follow. Until now, it has also expected you to pay to read it.

And it was never only the trades. Apprentices, designers, engineers, safety officers, councils and homeowners have all run into the same paywall.

That is about to change. On 25 September the Federal Government said it had completed the legislative process to release $42.7 million over four years to Standards Australia, funding free online access to standards referenced in Commonwealth, state and territory laws.

It is a good reform. It is also one that should never have been needed.

Free access to mandatory standards is funded and due within months

The money was first committed in the May Budget. Last week’s step clears the way for the Government and Standards Australia to finalise the program, which the Government expects to start in the coming months.

The Government estimates a small construction firm could save up to $1,600 a year on construction and electrical standards. Standards Australia is taking registrations for rollout updates.

Government summaries of the Budget measure describe it as free public read only access. That detail matters, and we come back to it below.

A mandatory standard is law you have been paying to read

Australian Standards are technical documents written by expert committees and published by Standards Australia, an independent not for profit company. On their own, they are voluntary.

They become mandatory when a law or code calls them up, which is how most compliance obligations on a residential site actually work. The National Construction Code is free to read, but much of what it requires sits inside the standards it references, and those have been sold separately.

What makes an Australian Standard mandatory?

An Australian Standard is a voluntary technical document until legislation, or a code given force by legislation such as the National Construction Code, references it. From that point, meeting the standard becomes a legal requirement for the work it covers. The text itself has remained owned and sold by Standards Australia, which is why builders and trades have paid to read rules they are legally bound to follow.

The scale is not small. The Productivity Commission counted about 893 current Australian Standards incorporated in legislation as at July 2025, plus another 659 superseded, obsolete or withdrawn standards that laws still point to.

Submissions to that study noted around 120 standards are referenced in the National Construction Code alone, and many of those reference further standards again.

For a small builder, that chain is the problem. You rarely need one document. You need the one the Code names, and the ones it names in turn.

Builders sit at the top of that chain. They answer for every standard on the job, from framing and slabs to waterproofing and glazing, including work done by their subbies. And they are the ones measured against those standards when a dispute lands.

You rarely need one document. You need the one the Code names, and the ones it names in turn.

The Productivity Commission recommended free access in 2006

None of this is new thinking. In 2006 the Productivity Commission recommended that governments fund free or low cost access to Australian Standards made mandatory by regulation, on the basic principle that legal requirements should be transparent and accessible.

Nearly twenty years later, in a National Competition Policy study published in December 2025, the Commission made the same call again. It found that placing the law behind a paywall puts a fixed cost on small businesses and startups, risks non compliance and undermines safety.

One submission it cited described a small electrical engineering business needing to buy hundreds of standards for a single project, at a total cost higher than the project’s profit margin.

How the rulebook ended up behind a paywall

Standards Australia funds its work largely by selling and licensing standards. The Commission put its royalty and ecommerce revenue at about $45 million in 2023 to 2024.

For most of the past two decades, those sales ran through one commercial distributor. In December 2003, Standards Australia granted SAI Global an exclusive worldwide licence to publish and sell Australian Standards, as SAI Global’s own submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission sets out.

An arbitration in late December 2018 found that any extended agreement would be non exclusive, and Standards Australia said it would move beyond the arrangement.

Here is where we land. Writing and maintaining standards costs real money, and someone has to carry it. But for years, governments took the benefit of writing standards into law without carrying the cost of making them readable.

That cost was passed down to the people least able to absorb it. The sole trader. The apprentice. The small firm pricing a job against a bigger competitor with a subscription.

The Commission made the same point in more measured terms. When government pays for access, it has to weigh that cost every time it makes a standard mandatory. That is a useful discipline, and one the system has lacked.

New Zealand made its key building standards free years ago

Across the Tasman, the building regulator trialled free downloads of a handful of building standards in December 2017, then funded more than 120 standards used to show Building Code compliance, paid for from the building levy. The timber framing standard NZS 3604 was among them.

The Commission also pointed to the Netherlands, where free access to a standard in legislation typically lifts its use six to ten times. That is the real prize. Not the $1,600, but more people actually reading the rules they build to.

Read only access leaves some questions open

The Commission’s preferred model went further than what has been funded. It recommended full access rather than a restricted read only form, noting participants needed more functionality to support compliance, and said funding should cover deemed to comply standards too.

Several practical details are yet to be published. Which standards are in scope. How standards referenced by other standards are treated. Whether superseded versions still named in law are included. What access looks like for a business with more than one user.

Industry groups including Lighting Council Australia have said they are seeking the same clarity from Standards Australia.

The funding is also modest against the task. $42.7 million over four years works out at roughly $10.7 million a year. The Commission’s rough indicator was $7 million a year, which Standards Australia told it understated the cost, while a Netherlands style model pointed to about $13.8 million.

What changes on site when the paywall comes down

For builders, the immediate change is simple. The rules a certifier, inspector or tribunal will hold your work against become something you can check without a purchase order.

Apprentices can read the standard their trade is assessed against. Small firms stop rationing access or relying on an old copy. And when a dispute turns on what a standard actually says, both parties can read the same page.

It does not simplify the standards themselves, and it does not fix the patchwork of state variations layered over the Code. Those are separate problems.

The Good Builder Take

Free access is the right call, and credit belongs to the trades, safety professionals, designers and librarians who kept pushing for it.

But it should be read as the correction of a long standing mistake rather than a gift. If the law requires a standard, the people it binds should be able to read it at no cost.

The test now is delivery. Whether access is genuinely usable on a phone, on site, across the whole chain of referenced standards. Or whether it becomes another limited reading room. We will be watching the rollout closely.

The principle is now settled. The next few months will show whether the system built to deliver it matches the principle, and whether the payoff for building quality follows.

Follow The Good Builder for updates as Standards Australia confirms how access will work.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

• Free Standards, Faster Approvals and More Trades on Site: What the Budget’s Productivity Package Outlines for Builders
• State Variations Added 600 Pages to the 2022 Building Code. Treasury’s Fix Is a Recommitment, Not a Mechanism.
• Construction Licensing and Compliance in Australia

Last updated: 30 September 2026. This article will be updated when Standards Australia confirms the scope and access arrangements for free mandatory standards.

General Information Only. This article provides general information only and does not constitute legal, financial or professional advice. It does not take into account your particular circumstances. Before acting on any information, consider seeking advice from a qualified professional. The Good Builder makes no representation that the information is complete or current at the time you read it.

Author: TGB Editorial