How to verify a subcontractor’s licence in WA (why DEMIRS can’t be automated like QBCC)

Every general contractor engaging trades in Western Australia is expected to confirm a subcontractor’s licence is current before they’re on site — the same baseline expectation as any other state. What’s different in WA is what "checking the register" actually involves. DEMIRS (the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety) runs the licensing regime for building, electrical, plumbing, gasfitting, and the other regulated trades, and its public search tool is genuinely different in kind from what QLD or NSW publish — worth understanding before you assume a WA check works the same way.

DEMIRS’ Online Licence Search isn’t an open dataset

QLD’s QBCC register and NSW’s Verify NSW portal are both built to be queried — a licence number goes in, a record comes back, and in QBCC’s case there’s enough structure behind it that a system can check against it programmatically. DEMIRS’ Online Licence Search is a different shape of tool entirely: it’s a search form a person fills in by hand, one licence at a time, with no bulk data, no public API, and no way to prefill or pass a licence number in through the URL. Every single check is a manual lookup.

That’s not a temporary gap waiting on DEMIRS to modernise something — it’s simply how the tool is built today. Any compliance system that says it "verifies WA licences" is either doing that manual lookup on someone’s behalf, or it isn’t actually checking WA licences against anything at all. Worth asking directly, if you’re relying on a tool for this: is a person on the other end actually opening DEMIRS and searching, or is "verified" being claimed without anyone having looked?

What that means day to day

For a GC checking manually, it means budgeting real time for it — DEMIRS’ search has to be opened fresh for every subcontractor, and the licence number typed in by hand rather than pasted from a spreadsheet lookup. There’s no shortcut for checking a batch of subcontractors at once the way an open register would allow.

It also means a WA licence check has a genuine expiry of its own: confirming a licence today says nothing about whether it’ll still be current in six weeks, and there’s no automated way to get pinged when it lapses. On a longer project, that’s the same risk as anywhere else — a licence that was fine at onboarding quietly running out mid-job — except in WA there’s no data feed to watch for it against. Someone has to remember to go back and look again.

How Novato handles this

Novato treats a WA licence honestly rather than pretending it’s the same kind of check as QLD or NSW: it deep-links a reviewer straight to DEMIRS’ Online Licence Search with the subcontractor’s details on hand, so the manual lookup DEMIRS requires is quick to do rather than a separate errand, and tracks the licence’s expiry against your project’s own end date so a lapse gets flagged before it becomes a surprise on site — even though the underlying check itself can’t be automated the way it can elsewhere.