On 1 July 2026, something changed for every business running field crews in New South Wales — and it landed with far less noise than it deserved.
Approved codes of practice used to be guidance. Useful, persuasive in court, but not a duty in themselves. As of section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), they are the baseline. SafeWork NSW puts it plainly: codes now become “the minimum performance standards that a PCBU is expected to comply with.”
What the duty actually says
Section 26A gives you two ways to satisfy it. You either:
- comply with the approved code of practice; or
- manage the hazards and risks in a different way— one that achieves “an equivalent or higher standard of work health and safety than the standard required by a Code.”
That second limb is the one worth reading twice. It is genuinely flexible — the regulator is not forcing everyone into one method. But flexibility comes with a burden: if you do it your way, you have to be able to show your way is at least as good.
Both roads run through evidence
Here is the part that catches people out. Neither path is satisfied by intent, and neither is satisfied by a policy document.
- Follow the code, and you need to be able to demonstrate you actually followed it — on that job, on that day, by that crew.
- Depart from the code, and you need to demonstrate the alternative and that it performed to an equivalent or higher standard.
In both cases the question a regulator, insurer or client asks is the same one: show me. A binder of procedures describes what was supposed to happen. It says nothing about what did.
Compliance used to be a document you wrote. It is now a record you have to be able to produce.
Where this breaks for field teams
Office-based businesses find this manageable, because their work already leaves a digital trail. Field work does not. The evidence of a job lives in the least retrievable places in your business:
- Photos on a crew member's personal phone, unnamed and unfiled.
- A safety check someone remembers doing, with nothing to show for it.
- Times written up from memory days later — and therefore approximate.
- The one exception that mattered, mentioned verbally and recorded nowhere.
None of that is a failure of safety. The crews we see are careful, and the work is usually done properly. It is a failure of capture — and after 1 July, the gap between doing it right and being able to prove it right is a legal one.
What good looks like now
The businesses that will find this easy are the ones whose proof is a by-product of the work rather than a second job at the end of the day:
- Checks captured on site, at the moment they are done, not back at the depot.
- Time and place attached automatically, so the record is verifiable rather than asserted.
- Photos tied to the step they belong to, not dumped in a folder by date.
- The whole pack retrievable in one action — because “we have it somewhere” is not the same as producing it.
If you are outside NSW, this is still worth your attention. The direction of travel across Australian WHS regulation has been consistent for years: from written policy toward demonstrable, auditable practice. NSW has simply gone first.
The honest question to ask your team this month is not “do we follow the code?” It is: if someone asked us to prove it for a specific job last Tuesday, how long would that take?
This is general information, not legal advice. If section 26A affects how you work, check your obligations with SafeWork NSW or your own WHS adviser.
Sources
- SafeWork NSW, Codes of practice — section 26A of the WHS Act 2011 (NSW), effective 1 July 2026: comply with a code, or manage hazards and risks in a different way that is equivalent to or higher than the standard in the code.