Checking a labour hire licence
Three states run a labour hire licensing scheme and one licenses employment agents under older legislation. Four states have nothing at all. Every register is free and public, and most people check them wrong.
States that licence
- Queensland Labour Hire Licensing
- Victoria Labour Hire Licensing
- South Australia Labour Hire Licensing
- Western Australia Employment Agents
States that do not
There is no register to search in these, and no licence for a provider to hold. Worth knowing, because it means a provider claiming to be "licensed" in one of them is describing something that does not exist.
- New South Wales no scheme
- Tasmania no scheme
- Australian Capital Territory no scheme
- Northern Territory no scheme
The mistake almost everyone makes
Searching the trading name. Registers list the legal entity that holds the licence, and the company on the licence is frequently not the name on the website, the ad or the invoice. A search that comes back empty usually means you searched the wrong string, not that the provider is doing anything wrong.
Get the ABN first and search that. It is the one identifier that cannot belong to two businesses.
What we publish, and what we will not
We are building a dated record of what these registers contain, because nobody has published the set and each register only answers one question at a time.
What we will never publish is a claim that a business is unlicensed. A register search that returns nothing is a fact about the search, not about the business, and at any scale we would be wrong about somebody. Where we report a search, we report the register, the term, the date and the result, and link you to the register so you can see for yourself.
If you work through agencies
Whether an agency holds a licence is their problem. Yours is re-sending the same white card to a different one every few months. Register once and we hold your tickets and track the dates, whoever you are working through.