How long to keep incident records in Australia

What the pages say

The rows below quote four regulators. Queensland and the NT both talk about records of each notifiable incident, kept for at least five years from the date of notification. The ACT gives the same period. Victoria is narrower: it talks about a copy of the written notification.

NT WorkSafe’s page adds that penalties apply for failing to keep the records. The last row quotes it.

What we couldn’t check

We didn’t find the same line on every regulator’s public page. NSW, WA, SA and Tasmania aren’t quoted here, and Comcare’s pages refuse our verification run. Silence on a page isn’t the same as no rule. Ask the regulator, or the person who looks after WHS for your business.

Five years is longer than a project

A job that runs eight months will be finished and handed over long before the five years are up. The site team scatters. The phone with the photos gets replaced. That’s the real risk with retention: not that a file is deleted on purpose, but that nobody knows where it is.

So decide where the record lives before the job starts, and who owns it when the job ends. A folder on one supervisor’s laptop isn’t a plan.

What belongs in the file

• The notice you sent, and the time and date you sent it
• The incident report, with the worker’s own account
• Photos and any other evidence, with their original timestamps
• Notes of who you spoke to at the regulator and what they said
• Actions taken, who did them and when
• Anything the regulator sent back

Handing a site over

The crunch point is the end of a job. The site office comes down, the supervisor moves to the next project and the phone is traded in. Make a handover list on the last week: where the register is, who owns it now, where the photos are backed up.

Put a name and a date on that list. A record with no named owner has a way of ending up with nobody.

Scanned copies of signed paper notices are worth keeping beside the digital record. Name each file with the date so a folder sorts itself.

Questions to ask your regulator

• How long does my state expect notifiable incident records to be kept?
• Does the same period apply to the incident register, or to the notice alone?
• Is a digital copy acceptable, and in what form?
• What should I do with records when the business changes hands?

Keeping it findable

Name files by date and site. Keep the notice and the incident record in the same place, so one search finds both. Back them up somewhere that isn’t a person’s phone. When a site closes, move the records to the company’s own storage and write down where.

In Haznote the report, photos, GPS point, timestamps and the manager’s confirmation sit on one record, and that record isn’t deleted. Incidents are marked, not removed. You can export a WHS PDF of it whenever you need to hand it over.