South Australia transition deadline
7 days until South Australia’s labour hire licensing deadline (29 July 2026).
South Australia’s scheme expanded on 29 January 2026 to cover all labour hire, not only the previously specified high-risk sectors, subject to a six-month transition. From 29 July 2026, penalties apply to providers operating without a licence and to anyone who engages an unlicensed provider.
Licensing by jurisdiction
| Jurisdiction | Mandatory scheme | Act | Regulator | Public register |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Queensland (QLD) | Yes | Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (Qld) | Labour Hire Licensing Queensland | Register |
| Victoria (VIC) | Yes | Labour Hire Licensing Act 2018 (Vic) | the Labour Hire Authority | Register |
| South Australia (SA) | Yes | Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (SA) | Consumer and Business Services | Register |
| Australian Capital Territory (ACT) | Yes | Labour Hire Licensing Act 2020 (ACT) | WorkSafe ACT | Register |
| New South Wales (NSW) | No | — | — | — |
| Western Australia (WA) | No | — | — | — |
| Tasmania (TAS) | No | — | — | — |
| Northern Territory (NT) | No | — | — | — |
Quantitative metrics
The Index also tracks, per scheme jurisdiction, the figures each regulator reports: active licensed providers, suspended licences, cancelled licences, pending applications. Pending applications are a leading indicator of market growth; suspensions, cancellations and enforcement outcomes are a measure of how actively a scheme is policed.
As at 30 June 2025, the most recent regulator annual reporting records 5,788 licensed labour hire providers in Victoria and 4,039 in Queensland. South Australia and Australian Capital Territory do not publish a current total, so those counts are shown as not yet available rather than estimated.
The public registers are interactive lookups rather than published totals, so the active-provider counts are taken from each regulator’s most recent annual reporting, captured and dated here, never estimated. Where a figure is not yet available it is shown as such rather than guessed; the machine-readable file carries each figure with its capture date.
Methodology and sources
Structural facts (which jurisdictions run a scheme, the governing Act, and the regulator) are drawn from each official regulator and are cross-checked on the matching state licensing pages. Quantitative figures are taken from each regulator’s published annual reporting — the public registers are interactive lookups that do not publish totals — and the active-provider counts shown are as at 30 June 2025. The dataset is versioned with a capture date and refreshed on a recurring basis; the current capture is 27 June 2026.
How to cite this data
FLOSMOSIS PTY LTD (2026). Australian Labour Hire Licensing Index. https://flosmosis.com/labour-hire-licensing-index. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Where licensing stops and evidence begins
A licence confirms a provider is permitted to supply workers. It says nothing about whether the record of the hours those workers actually worked will hold up if it is ever challenged.
That is the gap the Workforce Ledger Evidentiary Standard (WLES) addresses: hours verified at the point of work, approved by the supervisor, and sealed into a tamper-evident record before payroll.
Sources: Active-provider counts: Queensland Office of Industrial Relations, Regulatory Performance Self-Assessment Report 2024-25 (4,039); Victorian Labour Hire Authority, Annual Report 2024-25 (5,788). Structural facts: each state labour hire regulator (Labour Hire Licensing Queensland, the Labour Hire Authority, Consumer and Business Services, WorkSafe ACT), cited on the relevant state licensing page; and the Fair Work Ombudsman, Managing your labour contracting.