Can I do my own bathroom renovation in NSW?

You can do some of it. Demolition, painting and some preparation are open to a capable homeowner. Plumbing, electrical and waterproofing are licensed work and must be done by the appropriate licence holder, regardless of your skill level.

Can I tile my own bathroom?

Tiling itself is not licensed work in the way plumbing is, so a homeowner can legally tile. Whether it is a good idea is a different question. The waterproofing underneath it is licensed, so the wet area has to be done by a licence holder before any tile goes down.

What happens if unlicensed work is discovered?

It can affect insurance claims, complicate a sale when a building inspector finds it, and in some cases requires rectification. Unlicensed wet area or electrical work is the kind of thing that becomes expensive at the worst moment.

Bathroom Renovation: What You Can DIY and What Legally Needs a Licence

There is real money to be saved doing parts of a bathroom yourself, and there are parts where doing it yourself is illegal, uninsurable, or simply a bad trade of risk for savings.

Here is the honest line.

Must be licensed

Plumbing. All of it. Water supply, drainage, relocating a waste, connecting a toilet or a mixer. Plumbing work in New South Wales is licensed and must be certified. This is not a grey area.

Electrical. All of it. Lighting, exhaust fans, heated towel rails, underfloor heating, power points. Electrical work in a wet area is exactly the situation the licensing exists for.

Waterproofing. Licensed work in NSW. It is also the single highest-consequence part of the room, sealed under the tiles where nobody can inspect it. What the standard requires is demanding, and the failure mode is a strip-out.

Where a capable homeowner can genuinely help

Demolition. Removing old tiles, fixtures and sheeting is heavy, dusty, unskilled work, and it is charged at labour rates. If you have the time and a skip, this is the most realistic saving in the whole project.

Two cautions. Do not touch anything connected to plumbing or electrical until the relevant trade has isolated it. And be careful with old sheeting, because in Sydney homes of certain eras, wall linings can contain asbestos. If the house predates the late 1980s, get it assessed before you remove anything.

Rubbish removal. Ordering and filling your own skip rather than having it built into the quote.

Painting. Anything above the tile line, and the ceiling. Straightforward, and easy to do after the trades have gone.

Selections and procurement. Buying your own tiles, vanity, tapware and screen. You take on the risk of lead times and wrong orders, which is a real risk, but the margin is yours.

Final clean. Small saving, entirely doable.

The grey area: tiling

Tiling itself is not licensed in the way plumbing is. A homeowner can legally lay tiles.

Whether you should is different. Tiling looks simple and is not. The things that separate a good tiled bathroom from an obviously amateur one:

Setout. Where the first tile lands decides whether you get a sliver cut in the most visible corner. This is planned before any adhesive is mixed.
Flatness. Lippage, where one tile edge sits proud of the next, is instantly visible under raking light and cannot be fixed afterwards.
Cuts. Around penetrations, into niches, and mitred external corners. This is where the hours go and where amateur work shows.
Adhesive coverage. Wet areas need full coverage under the tile. Dabs leave voids that hold water and cause drummy tiles later.
Movement joints and silicone. In the right places, or the tiles crack at the corners.

And the hard constraint: the waterproofing under it must be done by a licence holder. So even a DIY tiling job has a licensed trade in the room first.

If you are pricing it, what it costs to have a bathroom tiled gives you the comparison.

The honest maths

The biggest realistic DIY saving is demolition and rubbish removal, and it is a decent one. The second is doing your own procurement.

Tiling is where people expect the big saving and where it most often goes wrong, because a bathroom is small, highly visible, permanently wet, and full of cuts. It is the least forgiving room in the house to learn on.

What we would suggest

Strip it out yourself if you have the time. Buy your own fittings if you enjoy that. Then have the licensed work and the tiling done by people who do it daily, because those are the parts that are expensive to fix and impossible to hide.

Our renovation packages are fixed price and include the waterproofing, and we are happy to work with a bathroom you have stripped out yourself.