“My pool build has stopped” — what to do now

First: is this actually a crisis?

Before anything else, it is worth being honest about which situation you are in, because the answer changes what you should do and most people assume the worse one.

Often not a crisis. Two or three quiet weeks between trades on a pool build is ordinary. Concrete needs to cure. Tilers, electricians and fencers are booked weeks out and a slipped date cascades. Wet weather stops excavation and concrete work entirely, and a wet fortnight in a wet month is simply a wet month. A builder running three jobs will have you waiting while they finish a pour somewhere else. None of that is abandonment.

Worth taking seriously. Six weeks with no work and no communication. Calls and emails unanswered for a fortnight. A refusal to give any date. A request for money out of sequence, or for payment ahead of work. Subcontractors contacting you about being unpaid — that last one is the strongest single signal on this list.

The distinction that matters is not how long it has been. It is whether you can get a date and whether the date holds. A builder who says “we are back on the 14th” and comes on the 14th is busy. A builder who has moved the date three times is telling you something, and a builder who will not give one at all has already told you.

Note also what this page is not about. If the builder has actually entered administration or liquidation, the path is different and faster: what to do if your pool builder becomes insolvent. Most stalls are not insolvencies.

Today: make the site safe, and stop the money

Two things need doing before any paperwork, and both are yours to do whether or not the delay is your fault.

Secure the excavation. Regulation 116(3) in Victoria requires that any excavation be fenced or otherwise guarded against being a danger to life or property, and the obligation does not care that the builder has gone quiet. More pointedly: as soon as the excavation or shell holds more than 300mm of water — and rain is enough — a barrier complying with AS1926.1-2012 is required and must be maintained. A half-dug pool after a wet week is a body of water in a backyard.

If the site fencing has been removed, panels have blown over, or the gate no longer latches, fix that today. Hire fencing if you have to. The cost of temporary fencing is trivial against the risk, and an unguarded excavation is itself an offence in addition to being the thing everyone on this page is actually worried about. If a Victorian surveyor judges that incomplete work endangers young children entering the pool area, they may ask the municipal building surveyor for an emergency order.

Stop the money. The QBCC's own guidance on non-completion lists this as a first step: instruct your bank in writing to make no further payments to your contractor. Then stop paying progress claims for work that has not been completed on site — a progress claim must be directly related to work progress and proportionate to, or less than, the value of the work it relates to. Deposit limits and progress payments sets out the rule.

Do not, at this stage, engage another builder to finish the work. It feels like the decisive move and it can cost you every remedy you have, because most insurance and regulator paths require the original contract to be dealt with first.

The clock nobody mentions: your building permit

Here is the deadline that quietly runs in the background of a stalled Victorian build, and it has nothing to do with the builder.

Regulations 53 and 54 require pool work to commence within 12 months of the permit issuing and be completed within six months after commencement. Where the pool and the safety barrier have not been completed in that window, a new building permit and a new building permit levy are required before any building work continues, and a stop work order should issue if a builder keeps working without one.

Six months from commencement is not long on a build that has already stalled. And the cost of missing it lands on the owner: the permit again, the levy again, the surveyor again — on a job that is already behind, and possibly with a builder who is not paying for anything.

So make the call to your building surveyor in week one, and ask two specific questions: what commencement date do you have recorded, and what stage is this job signed off to. Their commencement date is the one the six months runs from, not yours. They will also know whether a direction to fix has been issued, which is information you would otherwise never see, because directions go to the builder rather than to you.

Queensland and NSW have their own clocks — a two-year currency period and a five-year consent respectively. Permit expiry and lapsed permits sets all three out.

The written notice, and why it comes before everything else

Almost every path from here — regulator complaint, insurance claim, tribunal — assumes you have already done one thing: given the contractor written notice of what is wrong, with a timeframe to fix it.

The QBCC's guidance is to give the contractor written notice of every defective or unfinished item, by email or letter, with a timeframe for rectification such as 14 days. The exception is where the contractor is bankrupt, insolvent or has had their licence cancelled, in which case the notice serves no purpose.

Make it boring and complete. List the items. State the dates. Attach the contract clause if there is one. Send it by email so there is a timestamp. This is not the confrontational step it feels like — it is the document everyone afterwards will ask whether you sent, and its absence is the most common reason an otherwise good claim stalls.

At the same time, gather what any claim will need: the contract and any special conditions, the plans and specifications, every variation, the approvals, evidence of every payment made, and the correspondence. Doing this in week one while you are motivated is considerably easier than doing it in month four.

The Queensland deadlines that decide whether a claim is possible

If the job is in Queensland and heading toward non-completion, two figures decide everything and they are not widely known.

The contract must end within 2 years after the day work starts, and the claim must be made before the day that is 3 months after the day the contract ends. Outside those windows, the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme claim is not available, however strong the underlying case.

The three-month window is the dangerous one. Terminating a contract feels like the end of a long process, and it is actually the start of a short one. Three months from termination is not long to assemble evidence, obtain quotes to complete and lodge a claim.

And there is a trap at the front of it. The contract must be validly terminated before a non-completion claim can be considered, and the QBCC warns plainly that failure to properly terminate may result in not being entitled to a claim at all. Termination has to be lawful and grounded in the contract terms, a serious breach or another legal basis. This is the point to get legal advice, and the one step on this page where doing it yourself is a genuinely bad idea.

For defective rather than incomplete work, the path is a complaint to the QBCC, which may inspect and issue a direction to rectify — in most cases with a rectification period of 35 days. Ignoring one carries maximum penalties of $43,175 for an individual and $215,875 for a company, which is why directions are usually complied with. If defects are not being fixed covers that route.

Getting the pool finished

At some point the question stops being about the old builder and starts being about the hole in your backyard.

Two things make a stalled pool much easier for a replacement builder to take on, and both are worth protecting while you deal with everything above. A valid permit — a new builder inherits a live permit far more easily than an expired one, which is another reason the six-month Victorian clock matters. And a documented record of what stage the work reached, ideally confirmed by the surveyor, so the next builder is quoting on a known starting point rather than an unknown one.

Expect completion quotes to look expensive relative to the work remaining, and expect that for a legitimate reason: a builder taking over someone else's shell is accepting responsibility for work they did not do and cannot fully inspect. Some will decline for that reason alone. That is not a bad sign about your job; it is a reasonable position.

Get more than one. Comparing quotes from several pool builders matters more here than on a fresh build, because the willingness to take on part-finished work varies enormously between builders and the price spread reflects real differences in what each is prepared to warrant. Ask each what they will and will not warrant of the existing work, and get the answer in writing. What to ask a pool builder covers the rest.

Common questions

Sources

• QBCC — Non-completion of building work
• QBCC — Direction to rectify
• VBA Practice Note 05-2018 — Swimming Pool & Spa Safety
• Building Regulations 2018 (Vic), regulations 53, 54 and 116

General information only, current at 2026-09-16. Pool rules differ by state and by council, and penalty amounts are updated regularly. Confirm your own obligations with your council or a registered inspector before acting.