NCC 2025 or NCC 2022: which edition applies in each state and territory

Short answer: read on 30 September 2026, the national adoption table gives five different answers, and the regulators’ own pages add to most of them. NCC 2025 was adopted from 1 May 2026 in the ACT, Victoria and Western Australia, but the ACT’s page says it is not mandatory there until 1 May 2027, and Western Australia’s says the same for most building permit applications. New South Wales and Queensland remain on NCC 2022 until 1 May 2027; Tasmania used NCC 2025 from 1 May to 4 June 2026 and returned to NCC 2022 from 5 June, until the same date. South Australia uses NCC 2025 for plumbing and NCC 2022 for building work until then. The Northern Territory has not adopted NCC 2025. This page records dates, not requirements; check your own regulator before relying on it.

Which edition, state by state, read on 30 September 2026

The FAQ on this site closes with three Australian reference points. The first links to the ABCB’s guide to waterproofing in houses. Read on 24 August 2026 and again on 30 September 2026, that guide’s own text names NCC 2022 seven times and NCC 2025 not once, carries no date of its own, and says: “The information presented provides a national overview of the NCC and does not contain any state or territory variations.” The other two point into the Standards Australia store. One link, on a page of this site, and it already carries most of what this page is about.

The Board published NCC 2025 on 1 May 2026, and five months later the phrase “the National Construction Code” still did not resolve to one document. This page was first written from the national adoption table and the eight jurisdictions’ own pages as they stood on 24 August 2026, and they were read again on 30 September 2026; where they changed in between, both readings are given. It records dates, not requirements.

The edition is set by the jurisdiction, not by the publication date

Part A3 of NCC 2025 Volume One says so in its own words: “The NCC has legal effect through references in relevant State or Territory building and plumbing legislation.” Clause (3) of the same Part: “The NCC is subject to, and may be overridden by, State or Territory legislation.” The Board’s adoption page carries a matching caution above its table: “Important: Some NCC requirements may apply at different times or not at all due to state or territory variations.” A publication date is not a commencement date, and a national code is not a national answer.

Five answers on one table, read on 30 September 2026

The Board publishes one adoption table: eight rows, a column for NCC 2025 and a column for the transition period. Those rows gave five answers.

• Three rows read 1 May 2026 — the ACT, Victoria and Western Australia. The ACT and Western Australian rows add 12 months; Victoria’s reads N/A.
• Two rows read 1 May 2027 — New South Wales and Queensland.
• One row reads 1 May 2027 (Temporarily adopted: 1 May - 4 June 2026), with a transition of 5 June 2026 - 1 May 2027 — Tasmania.
• One row carries two dates in a single cell — South Australia, BCA: 1 May 2027 and PCA: 1 May 2026.
• One row reads Not adopted, with no future date at all — the Northern Territory.

Set each jurisdiction’s own page beside its row and the groups still blur. The ACT and Western Australia both let the earlier edition be used inside the transition year. South Australia is in two groups at once by design, and in Western Australia the transition year is for building work only: the plumbing bulletin mentions no such year.

The national table was corrected for Tasmania

On 24 August 2026 the Tasmania row read 1 May 2026 and N/A — cell for cell, the same as Victoria’s. On the same day the page published by Consumer, Building and Occupational Services, the Tasmanian building regulator, read: “The National Construction Code (NCC) 2025 commenced in Tasmania on 1 May 2026. However, recent legislative changes mean this arrangement was temporary.” And below it: “From 5 June, NCC 2022 again applies in Tasmania until 1 May 2027, after which time NCC 2025 will be adopted.”

The two official pages disagreed. By 30 September 2026 the national row had been rewritten to match the regulator: 1 May 2027 (Temporarily adopted: 1 May - 4 June 2026), with a transition of 5 June 2026 - 1 May 2027. An archived copy of the table from 10 July 2026 still shows the old row, and the table itself carries no date, so when it changed cannot be read from it. From 5 June, when Tasmania’s change took effect, to at least 24 August 2026 (the old row is on an archived copy of 10 July and was there on 24 August), a reader who checked only the national table was given a different answer for Tasmania from the one its regulator gave.

One detail makes a change like that hard to catch. Of the regulator pages quoted here, New South Wales (13 May 2026) and Tasmania (5 June 2026) carry a visible last-updated stamp, and Queensland’s source and Western Australia’s plumbing source are a dated newsflash and a dated bulletin rather than maintained pages. The national table carries no date at all.

Queensland’s delay is printed inside NCC 2025

Queensland’s Building and Plumbing Newsflash 638, dated 1 May 2026: “The commencement of the National Construction Code (NCC) 2025 has been delayed until 1 May 2027. Until then, the NCC 2022 will remain in effect for building and plumbing work.” A footnote defines the term it has just used: “NCC 2022 includes Amendment 1 and Amendment 2 as published by the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB).”

The mechanism is the part worth knowing. The same newsflash says: “The delay is being implemented under the NCC 2025, through Schedule 7 (Queensland variations).” The document that does not yet apply in Queensland is the document that says so. Downloading the current edition is not the same thing as finding out what applies.

One state, two editions

South Australia’s page spells out both halves of its split row: “NCC 2022 Amendment 2 will remain in force as the Building Code under the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 until 30 April 2027”, and “South Australia adopted the Plumbing Code within NCC 2025 on 1 May 2026”. The footnote under the national table gives those names their scope: the Building Code of Australia is Volumes One and Two, the Plumbing Code of Australia is Volume Three.

So in South Australia “which edition” has a second half, and in a bathroom it is not academic: on 30 September 2026, as on 24 August, the plumbing work and the building work in one room sat under two different editions.

In the ACT and Western Australia the answer is per project

The ACT page states that NCC 2025 commenced on 1 May 2026 “but will not be mandatory until May 1 2027”, and that in between a project may comply with either edition but “cannot comply with a mix of regulations from each version”. Then the sentence that breaks the map: “Projects with a Development Application or Works Approval Application formally lodged before 1 November 2026, may continue to seek Building Approval under either NCC 2022 or NCC 2025 until that Development Application expires.” Some ACT projects can still be running the 2022 edition after the 2025 edition becomes mandatory.

Western Australia reaches a similar place by a different rule. Its Building and Energy alert says most building permit applications may apply either “the Building Code in effect, or the Building Code that was in effect 12 months before the time the application is made”, and that BCA 2022 with Amendments 1 and 2 “can be applied until 30 April 2027”. That alert is about Volumes One and Two only; the phrase Plumbing Code does not appear on it.

The plumbing side is covered separately, in Western Australia’s Industry Bulletin 173, dated April 2026: “Commencing 1 May 2026, the Regulations will adopt the 2025 edition of the PCA (PCA 2025) as the primary standard that applies to plumbing work in WA, replacing the 2022 edition.” The first version of this page, written from pages read on 24 August 2026, said no such statement had been found; the bulletin is dated April 2026, about four months before that reading. So Western Australia, like South Australia, runs two clocks: its plumbing code changed edition on 1 May 2026, while most building permit applications may still apply the 2022 building code until 30 April 2027.

What each jurisdiction changes, counted in one volume

Part A3 puts the changes in Schedule 3 for the Commonwealth and Schedules 4 to 11, one per state and territory. Counting the contents entries of NCC 2025 Volume One on 24 August 2026 (the June 2026 version of the file, still the current one on 30 September), and setting aside the introduction, referenced-documents and footnote entries carried as boilerplate, the eight jurisdiction schedules hold one hundred and twenty-one substantive entries between them: New South Wales thirty-five, Tasmania twenty-six, South Australia twenty-three, the Northern Territory seventeen, Victoria twelve, Queensland five, Western Australia three, and the ACT none.

That covers Volume One and nothing else. Volume Two carries the same nine schedules and was not counted, and neither were Volume Three or the Housing Provisions Standard.

The zero is the interesting one. The ACT schedule holds an introduction and a footnote and no variations, and the introduction says why: “The ACT Appendix is notified on the ACT Legislation Register and can be found at … under the Regulations and Instruments tab.” It adds: “Users of the BCA must check that they are using the version of the ACT Appendix currently in force …” Reading NCC 2025 cover to cover does not tell you what applies in Canberra, and the code says as much.

Three of the five name the amendment; two do not

Five jurisdictions’ own pages named NCC 2022 as the code that applies on 24 August 2026, and still did on 30 September: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia for building work, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. They are not equally specific about which NCC 2022. New South Wales states it exactly — “The current edition of the Code is NCC 2022 Amendment 2, which came into effect on 29 July 2025.” South Australia names it in the sentence quoted above, and Queensland in its footnote. The Tasmanian page writes NCC 2022 and never follows the word Amendment with a number; the Northern Territory page never uses the word Amendment at all.

The Board’s amendments page, read on both days, lists Amendment 1 from 1 May 2025 and Amendment 2 from 29 July 2025, and lists no third. A page that says NCC 2022 without naming an amendment is not saying something different from the three that do. It is saying less.

The code is free but much of what it points to is not

The New South Wales page puts the first half plainly: “Copies of the NCC can be downloaded for free from the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) website.” The second half sits in Volume One’s schedule of referenced documents: “The Standards and other documents listed in this Schedule are referenced in the NCC.”

On 24 August 2026 that schedule held one hundred and seventy-three rows across seven columns. Sorted by how the first column starts, eighty-two rows begin AS followed by a space, forty-six begin AS/NZS, three begin AS ISO and seven begin ABCB. The remaining thirty-five start with something else — five ASTM documents, four ISO, three NASH and two EN among them, and three rows where even the number is N/A. The reading list of an Australian code is not an all-Australian list, and what the schedule carries of any entry is a number, a year and a title, never the text.

Standards Australia sells that text for the Australian Standards among them. Its store terms grant a “single user … limited licence to access the Content” in consideration of payment, and require that customers “must not reproduce, communicate, or otherwise distribute the Product or Content, in any format … without the prior written permission of Standards Australia”. That is an access licence, not a republication licence, and it is why no Australian Standard is quoted anywhere on this page — including the two this site links from its own FAQ.

AS 3958 is not law follows one tiling standard through that same schedule, and finds it absent.

Three questions before a sentence beginning the NCC requires

That sentence arrives in one of two shapes: it names no edition, or it tells you to check you are reading the most recent one — which, in the jurisdictions above still on NCC 2022, is the wrong document.

For a wet area the same question arrives as paperwork rather than as an edition number. Which documents to ask your waterproofer for lists what to keep and who issues it.

1. Which edition — and if the answer is NCC 2022, which amendment, since two of the five pages that name it do not say.
2. Which jurisdiction — and whether its own regulator currently agrees with the national table, which for Tasmania it did not from 5 June to at least 24 August 2026.
3. Building or plumbing — since South Australia and Western Australia answer differently for each, and Volumes One and Two are not Volume Three.

What this page is not

Every date and quotation above was read on 24 August 2026 from the ABCB’s NCC website and the eight jurisdictions’ own government pages, and read again on 30 September 2026, except the Western Australian plumbing bulletin, which was first read on 30 September. The counts were made on 24 August 2026 and not repeated; the Volume One file they were made from was still the current one on 30 September. The Tasmanian row and the Western Australian plumbing statement are the two places where the second reading changed this page. Nothing here states what any edition requires, or whether a tile, a finish or a detail satisfies any part of one. That is a judgment for the responsible installer or specifier, working from the edition current in their jurisdiction on the day the work is approved. The National Construction Code 2025 was provided by the Australian Building Codes Board under the CC BY 4.0 licence.

This page also has a short shelf life. 1 May 2027 is the changeover named by New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia’s building code, the day the Western Australian choice closes, and the day the ACT’s narrows to projects already lodged. Before relying on any of the above, check the regulator for your own jurisdiction — and read the date stamp on whatever page you rely on, if it carries one.

Next step — read a product page the same way. What to confirm before choosing takes the Specifications panel row by row, and Tile sizes in Australia does the same for the dimensions.

Where this guide sits: Where to start sets out the order the guides follow.

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