New Zealand doesn’t require every tradesperson to be licensed. That surprises people. Builders working on restricted work need to be Licensed Building Practitioners, and gasfitters, plumbers and drainlayers need to be registered with the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, but plenty of other trades have no compulsory licence at all. Anyone can call themselves a painter, a landscaper or a handyman and start taking jobs tomorrow. Most of them are perfectly competent. Some aren’t, and there’s no central register that sorts one from the other.
So the checking is on you. Here’s what actually tells you something, roughly in order of how much effort it takes.
Check the register that actually applies to the job
If the work is restricted building work (most structural, weathertightness, plumbing or gasfitting jobs on a home), the person doing it is legally required to be licensed, and you can check that in about thirty seconds:
- Builders: the Licensed Building Practitioners register at lbp.govt.nz. Search by name.
- Plumbers, gasfitters, drainlayers: the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board register.
- Electricians: the Electrical Workers Registration Board register.
If someone offering restricted work isn’t on the relevant register, that’s not a minor paperwork gap. It’s a legal problem for you as well as them, and it can complicate insurance claims and resale down the line. This is the one check I’d never skip.
For everything else, the NZBN and the reviews do most of the work
For trades without a licensing register, there’s no government database that vouches for competence. What you can check is whether the business is actually real: search its NZBN at nzbn.govt.nz and confirm the trading name matches what’s on the quote. A business that’s been registered for six years reads differently to one registered three weeks ago under a name that sounds suspiciously like a competitor’s.
Then read the reviews, and read them properly rather than just checking the star average. A 4.8 average built from 60 reviews across two years tells you something. A 5.0 average built from four reviews all posted the same week tells you the opposite of what it looks like. Look for reviews that mention specific work, not just “great service, highly recommend.” Specific beats glowing.
Get more than one quote, even when it’s tempting not to
I know this is the advice everyone gives and nobody follows when they just want the job done. Do it anyway, for jobs over a few hundred dollars. A single quote gives you no reference point for whether the price is reasonable, and a wildly cheap quote is itself information: either they’re desperate for work, underinsured, or planning to cut a corner you won’t notice until it fails.
You’re also entitled to ask directly whether they carry public liability insurance, and a legitimate operator will answer without getting defensive about the question.
Know what the law actually gives you if it goes wrong
The Consumer Guarantees Act requires services to be carried out with reasonable care and skill, within a reasonable time, and at a reasonable price if none was agreed. If a job is faulty, you can require it to be fixed, and if the trader refuses or can’t, you may be able to get someone else to fix it and recover reasonable costs, or in serious cases reject the work and get a refund. The Fair Trading Act separately bans misleading claims, so a “fully qualified” claim that turns out to be false isn’t just a broken promise, it’s potentially unlawful conduct you can report to the Commerce Commission.
None of this makes hiring risk-free. Even a licensed, well-reviewed trade can have a bad day or a job go sideways for reasons nobody could have predicted. What the checks above do is shrink the odds, cheaply, before you’ve handed anyone a deposit. The register check takes thirty seconds. Do that one every time, no exceptions, and treat the rest as proportional to what the job costs.
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