What to do if a tradie doesn't finish the job
What can I do if a tradie doesn't finish the job?
Put your concerns in writing to the tradesperson first and give them a reasonable deadline to respond. If that fails, contact your state's building regulator or fair trading office, which can help resolve home building disputes. If the business has stopped trading, a claim on home warranty insurance may cover completing the work.
The job was half done, and then the calls stopped being returned. Or it was finished, and the defects that appeared a month later are not getting fixed. It is one of the most stressful situations a homeowner faces, partly because it is rarely clear what to do first.
The order matters. Here is the sequence that protects your position, and who to contact in each of the three largest states.
1. Put it in writing
Before anything else, write to the business -- email is fine -- setting out what is unfinished or defective, what you want done, and a reasonable date to respond by. Keep it factual and keep a copy.
Almost every dispute process starts by asking what you did to raise the problem directly. A written record answers that question and is often enough on its own to get someone back on site.
2. Do not pay ahead, and do not hire someone else yet
Hold back any payment for stages that are not complete. And resist the urge to bring in another tradie to finish the job before the dispute is resolved: doing so can make it harder to claim against the original business or its insurance.
Take dated photographs of the work as it stands. If it ends up in front of a tribunal, what you can show matters more than what you remember.
3. Contact your state regulator
Each state runs a service to help resolve home building disputes before they reach a tribunal.
- New South Wales: NSW Fair Trading handles home building complaints, and unresolved disputes can go to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
- Victoria: the Building and Plumbing Commission, which absorbed Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria in July 2025. Unresolved disputes can go to VCAT.
- Queensland: the Queensland Building and Construction Commission offers early dispute resolution, and disputes can go to QCAT.
4. If the business has gone
If the builder has died, disappeared or become insolvent, the job may be covered by home warranty insurance -- the compulsory cover on larger residential jobs. It exists precisely for this. Find the certificate you were given at the start and contact the insurer or scheme named on it.
Claims have time limits, so do not wait to see whether they come back.
The cheaper fix is before the job starts
Most of these situations are visible in advance: a business with no track record of finishing comparable work, a large deposit, or no insurance certificate. Checking those before you sign costs twenty minutes. Recovering from a half-finished job costs months.