"My pool builder has gone bust" — what to do next

The next 24 hours

Four things, in this order. None of them cost money and none of them require a lawyer yet.

1. Stop every payment. Cancel any scheduled transfer and do not pay an invoice that arrives after the news, however it is worded. Once an administrator or liquidator is appointed, paying the builder does not buy you work.
2. Photograph everything, today. The state of the excavation, the shell, the steel, the equipment on site, the barrier. An insurer's building consultant will inspect later, and the site will have changed. Date-stamped photographs of what existed on the day are worth more than any account of it afterwards.
3. Assemble the file. The signed contract with every variation, the insurance certificate of currency for your property, every receipt and bank record, and all written communication. Missing paperwork is the most common reason a claim stalls, and the one thing you can fix tonight.
4. Find out what actually happened. "Gone bust" covers voluntary administration, liquidation and simply stopping work. They are different events with different consequences, and only some of them are trigger events for your insurance.

Warranty insurance is last-resort insurance: it responds when the builder cannot be pursued, not when the builder is difficult. That distinction decides everything that follows.

The next 7 days

Lodge a notification, even if you cannot yet lodge a claim. This is the step most people miss and it is the one that protects them. In New South Wales you can send icare a loss notification before the grounds for a claim are established; icare's own guidance is that notifying within your insurance periods protects your claim rights, so you may still be able to claim after those periods expire. If you do not notify inside the period, you may not be able to claim later at all.

Confirm the trigger event. A policy activates only when the builder dies, disappears, becomes insolvent, or has their licence suspended for failing to comply with a tribunal or court order in your favour. In New South Wales, Building Commission NSW can issue a letter confirming the position, and that letter goes with the claim.

Do not appoint a replacement builder yet. The insurer may want to source quotations, and in New South Wales you can nominate your own builder once the determination is made. Commissioning rectification work before the assessment can complicate what is payable.

Get the contract price and the amount paid onto one page. Contract price as varied, total paid, work genuinely completed. That single line — what you have paid minus what exists — is the number the whole claim turns on, and in New South Wales it also tells you whether the 20% non-completion sub-limit will bite before the $340,000 cap does.

Is it as bad as it feels? Sometimes it is not

Two situations get mistaken for insolvency and are not.

A builder who has stopped answering is not necessarily insolvent. Slow work, a subcontractor dispute or a cash-flow squeeze look identical from your driveway. This matters because the insurance does not respond to a builder who is merely unresponsive — you have to pursue them first, through the tribunal if necessary. Uncomfortable, but far more likely to end with your pool finished.

A licensed entity changing name or structure is not automatically a failure either. Check the licence status at the state regulator before assuming the worst; our guide to checking a pool builder's licence lists the four public registers and what each is searchable by. All of them are free.

And the genuinely reassuring part: if the contract was properly insured, a half-built pool is a recoverable position. The people who come out of this badly are almost always the ones who paid a long way ahead of the work — which is exactly what the statutory deposit and progress-payment limits exist to prevent. The limits are set by law in every state, and a deposit paid above the legal limit is not covered by the insurance.

When we are not the answer

This site compares pool quotes. It is not a legal service and it cannot lodge a claim for you. Here is who to go to instead, and this is the first list on the page for a reason.

• Your state insurer or regulator, first and free. icare and Building Commission NSW in New South Wales; the QBCC in Queensland, which administers the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme directly; Consumer Affairs Victoria and the Building and Plumbing Commission in Victoria.
• A construction or insolvency lawyer where the amounts are large, where the builder is disputing rather than gone, or where a tribunal order is going to be needed to establish the trigger event. Several firms publish free guidance on this specific scenario.
• The administrator or liquidator, once appointed, for anything about money already paid. You are a creditor in that process and it runs on its own timetable, separate from the insurance claim.

The one thing this site can help with is the part that comes after: getting comparable quotes to finish the job, from builders who work in your postcode, once you know what the insurer will cover. Do that after the determination, not before.

Common questions

Sources

• icare — Home Building Compensation Fund claims
• QBCC — Time limits for cover and claims
• QBCC — Maximum home warranty entitlements
• Consumer Affairs Victoria — Domestic building insurance and insolvency
• NSW Government — Building a pool: rights and obligations

General information only, current at 2026-09-07. 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.