Retaining Wall Building Permits — Melbourne & Victoria

Retaining walls look like landscaping, so the permit question often comes up only when a neighbour asks. In Victoria a retaining wall is building work. Once it reaches a metre in height, forms part of a bigger job, or holds up anything other than its own backfill, it needs a building permit. That is not council approval: the permit comes from a registered building surveyor, private or municipal, although council’s report and consent can come into it on a boundary.

Cornerstone is a building surveying practice working across Melbourne and all of Victoria, with permits issued by our registered building surveyor. We handle retaining wall permits for homeowners, owner-builders, landscapers and builders: the assessment, the building permit, the inspections and the certificate of final inspection. One surveyor, one fixed fee, quoted before you start.

When a retaining wall needs a permit

Schedule 3 of the Building Regulations 2018 exempts a retaining wall from needing a building permit only when it is less than 1 m in height, not associated with other building work, and not protecting an adjoining property. Miss any one of those and the wall needs a permit. In practice:

• A metre or more in height. The key threshold is 1 m: the exemption only covers walls under a metre.
• Any height when it carries a load. A wall under a shed slab, a pool, a house footing or a driveway is associated with other building work.
• Any height on or near a boundary. It is holding up the neighbour’s ground or holding your fill back from it: protecting adjoining property.
• Over an easement. Needs the report and consent of the authority the easement is vested in before a permit can issue.
• With a fence on top. Wall and fence are normally assessed as one combined height, and on a boundary the total can mean report and consent.
• Cut-and-fill on sloping estate blocks. Often a metre at the low corner, usually retaining someone else’s ground, and rarely covered by the house permit.

How height is measured, terraced walls and the driveway grey area are in our guide on when a retaining wall needs a permit.

Not sure which side of the line yours falls on? Send a photo, the heights and the supplier’s drawings and we’ll tell you for free before you order materials.

What we need from you

From your landscaper or wall supplier

The drawings or the quote, whichever exists yet. The heights along the wall, a photo, and what sits above and behind the wall: a fence, a driveway, a pool, the neighbour’s yard. If your supplier, installer or contractor wants to send the drawings to us direct, they can — the permit is still issued in your name and we come back to both of you.

From the engineer

Every wall that needs a permit needs a structural engineer’s design: footings or piers, reinforcement, drainage behind the wall, and any surcharge load from a driveway, fence or building above. Most landscapers have an engineer they work with; if not, we can point you to one.

From you

The property address, so we can check the title and the planning overlays, and a copy of any planning permit. A site plan showing the wall against boundaries, easements and buildings, with the cut and fill heights; a marked-up aerial photo is enough to start.

What it costs

Included in the fixed fee. The assessment, the building permit, the inspections the job needs and the certificate of final inspection.

Charged separately and passed through. Council’s report-and-consent fee where the siting rules call for one, the state building permit levy where it applies, the engineer’s design, and any easement consent.

What changes the fee. A report and consent, an easement consent, or a combined job such as a wall with a fence on top or two walls on the one site.

Builders, suppliers and installers who send us regular work can ask for our fee schedule — see our page for builders and suppliers.

Send the drawings and we quote a fixed fee, usually within one business day.

Where we do this work

Retaining walls follow sloping ground and estates that were cut and filled to make level house pads. Many of ours are on the benched lots of northern Melbourne’s growth corridor — Doreen, Mernda, Wollert, Sunbury and the Highlands estate at Craigieburn — where a level change along a side or rear boundary is standard. In the east it is the foothill blocks around Knox, where the ground climbs toward the Dandenongs. Further out, the sloping Surf Coast and Macedon Ranges sites on our regional Victoria page produce the same walls on bigger blocks.

Things that catch people out

• “The landscaper said no permit needed.” The exemption has more conditions than the brochure version, and the better landscapers and suppliers send their customers to a surveyor to check. That check is free.
• Drainage. More walls fail from water pressure than from bad blocks. The engineer’s drainage detail is part of the permit, and the wall has to be built to it.
• Sleeper walls, boulder and rock walls, gabions. Treated pine and hardwood sleepers, boulder walls and gabion baskets follow the same rules as concrete and block — the material doesn’t change the threshold.
• Starting before the permit is issued. Once the concrete is in, nobody can inspect what’s under it. Ring us before the excavator arrives.