7 minute read
Victorian rental compliance, in plain English
Every safety obligation a Victorian rental provider carries under the Residential Tenancies Regulations 2021, how often each one falls due, and who is responsible when it does not.
The three cycles, and why they are three
A Victorian rental property carries three recurring safety obligations, and they are genuinely separate. An electrical safety check every two years. A gas safety check every two years, for any property with a gas connection. Smoke alarm testing every twelve months, for every property.
The two-year checks and the annual one drift apart almost immediately, because each cycle restarts from the date its own check was done rather than from a shared anniversary. A property whose electrical check was done in March 2026 and whose smoke alarms were tested in September 2026 has two different dates to hit, and hitting one does nothing for the other.
This is the single most common way compliance fails: an agency tracks one date per property, does a visit, ticks the property off, and discovers eighteen months later that the smoke alarms have been overdue for six of them.
Who is responsible
The obligation sits with the rental provider — the owner. In practice the property manager holds the diary, arranges the access and wears the phone call, which is why the compliance record has to live somewhere the agency can see it rather than in an owner's filing cabinet.
The person doing the work must be appropriately licensed or registered: a licensed electrician for the electrical safety check, a licensed gasfitter for the gas safety check. A general handyman cannot perform either, and a check performed by an unlicensed person does not satisfy the regulation no matter how thorough it was.
What a check produces, and what it does not
An electrical safety check produces a Certificate of Electrical Safety, issued through Energy Safe Victoria by the electrician who attended. A gas safety check produces a gas compliance certificate the same way. Neither is generated by a compliance management service — including this one — and any provider suggesting otherwise is describing something that is not the statutory document.
What a service should give you is everything around the certificate: the due date tracked, the visit arranged, the tenant contacted, the certificate uploaded against the property the moment it is issued, and a job report saying what was checked and what was found.
What overdue actually costs
The direct answer is that an overdue check is a breach of the regulations. The practical answer is worse: after an incident, the question asked by an insurer, a coroner or a tribunal is when the last check was done and who can prove it. An agency that cannot produce a date and a certificate is in a very poor position regardless of whether the incident had anything to do with the check.
The fix is not heroics at the end of the cycle. It is knowing the date months out, being reminded before it lands, and having the visit booked while there is still slack in the calendar.