Site induction requirements in Victoria

Short answer: yes. Victoria is the only state with a regulation that requires site-specific training by name. Regulation 330 of the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017 says an employer must give every person it employs to do construction work safety training that relates to the particular site. There is no housing exemption and no dollar threshold.

That puts Victoria on its own. NSW gets to the same place through a general duty, and Queensland exempts housing. In Victoria an induction is a rule WorkSafe can check you against, on a two-room extension as much as on a ten-storey job.

What regulation 330 says, and who it lands on

The regulation is one sentence long. The duty sits with the employer, and it covers the people that employer puts on the job. The training has to relate to "the particular workplace". A general talk about construction safety does not meet it, and neither does a white card.

Read who the duty falls on, because it changes what you do as the builder. Each subbie business owes regulation 330 training to its own workers. You owe it to yours. On a typical house, that means the plasterer, the sparky and the roofer each have the duty for their own crews, while you hold the information they need to meet it: the hazards on this block, the rules on this site, where the first aid kit is.

So in practice the builder runs the induction. You are the only one who knows the site well enough to deliver it, and you are the one who has to live with the consequences when a subbie's labourer walks onto a slab nobody warned them about.

The co-ordination plan over $350,000

Victoria's threshold for a construction project is $350,000. NSW and Queensland use $250,000. Over that figure the principal contractor needs a health and safety co-ordination plan, which is Victoria's name for what the other states call a WHS management plan.

Two parts of that subdivision bear directly on inductions:

• The plan must include any site safety rules, and the arrangements for making sure everyone at the workplace is told about them (regulation 336).
• Before anyone starts construction work, the principal contractor must make sure they are aware of the plan and can get to it (regulation 337).

On a home build, the principal contractor is usually you. Where domestic premises become a workplace and the owner engages someone to manage or control it, the person engaged is treated as the principal contractor (regulation 333).

The same subdivision requires a sign visible from outside the site with the principal contractor's name and phone number (regulation 334). That sign is also the obvious place for your induction QR code.

Below $350,000 there is no co-ordination plan. Regulation 330 still applies to anyone you employ, and running the same short induction for everyone else on site is the simplest way to show you told people what they needed to know.

The construction induction card is a separate thing

Victoria calls the white card a construction induction card. Nobody may do construction work without a current one (regulation 340), and an employer must not knowingly let an employee do it without one (regulation 341). The card has no expiry date. It lapses only if the holder does no construction work for two years in a row (regulations 347 and 349).

Two exceptions are worth knowing at the gate. Visitors who stay with a card holder the whole time, and people dropping off plant or materials, sit outside the card rules (regulation 338). A new starter who hasn't done construction work in the past two years can work for up to 28 days without a card, if the employer has applied and paid for the training and supervises them directly in the meantime (regulation 342).

Checking the card is worth doing. It just doesn't count as the site-specific training. The card says the worker knows construction in general. Regulation 330 is about your site.

Where the SWMS fits in

High risk construction work needs a safe work method statement before it starts, and the work has to follow it (regulation 327). If it doesn't, the work stops until it does (regulation 327(2)). In Victoria you keep the SWMS for the duration of the high risk work (regulation 329). There is no two-year post-incident rule here, unlike the harmonised states.

The induction is where the SWMS reaches the person doing the work. In August 2025 Hallidays Heating and Cooling was fined $85,000, plus $4,264 costs, after a first-year apprentice fell three metres through a staircase void at a townhouse in Ormond. The SWMS for the job required harnesses before any part of the void platform was removed. WorkSafe found the apprentice had not received a SWMS induction for the task, and the document had not been signed by the three workers on it.

The paperwork was there. What was missing was the ten minutes where someone walked the apprentice through it.

What a Victorian induction should cover

Regulation 330 doesn't list topics. A sensible base is the six areas the national model Code of Practice uses: site safety rules, facilities, first aid and emergency procedures including an after-hours contact, health monitoring, access and security, and how to raise a safety issue. Then add the part only you can write: the hazards on this site this week, and the SWMS for the work the person is about to do.

The free site induction checklist builder lays those areas out and flags any you have left blank.

What to keep

None of these regulations sets a retention period for induction records. Keep a dated record of who was inducted, when, and on which version of your site rules. Hold it at least as long as you hold the co-ordination plan and the SWMS for the job, and longer if anything goes wrong on site.

Running it from the gate

Foreman's site inductions put the induction behind one QR code at the gate. Workers scan it on their own phone, read your site documents including any SWMS, enter their construction induction card number and sign. Every sign-on lands in a register for that site that you can check from anywhere. Inductions are free and unlimited on every plan.

If you would rather do it on paper, the free site induction record has the same fields.

Other states

NSW and Queensland both reach a different answer, for different reasons. See site induction requirements in NSW and site induction requirements in Queensland, or check any state with the free SWMS and site induction checker.

For WA, SA, Tasmania, the ACT and the NT, see site induction requirements in every state, which compares all eight in one table.

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This page explains general obligations and is not legal advice. For a specific situation, check with WorkSafe Victoria or get advice on your contract.