There are times when work has to be carried out urgently for the safety of people and property. You must apply for a certificate of acceptance [PDF, 226 KB] where your work has been carried out

  • urgently without a building consent, and
  • not exempt when the work was carried out.

Certificates of acceptance can generally also be issued for work done after 1 July 1992 (when building consents were introduced) where

  • an owner or previous owner didn’t obtain a building consent for the work under the Building Act 1991 or 2004
  • an accredited building consent authority granted a consent for the building work but is unable to issue a code compliance certificate
  • building work that was started or consented before 31 March 2005 and affects public premises.

A certificate of acceptance is not a code compliance certificate. It’s a statement that helps provide some assurance to the building owner or future owners that the work is recorded by council.

Council has 20 working days to either grant or refuse your application.

Where an application identifies work done that doesn’t comply, council may issue a notice to fix with details of what work needs to be done to make it comply. In many cases it is not possible to see all the building work during the inspection. The certificate will therefore only cover the parts of the building that can be seen and verified – therefore the value of a certificate of acceptance to you or any future owner may be limited.