Public Liability Claims in NSW: The Civil Liability Act 2002, Injury Thresholds and Time Limits

A public liability claim in New South Wales is a negligence claim under the Civil Liability Act 2002, brought against the occupier, business, event organiser or council responsible for the property or activity where you were hurt.

This page is part of our broader guide to public liability claims in Australia, which compares NSW's approach against every other state and territory. Here is how a claim actually works under NSW law: who you claim against, the occupier's duty, the defences, claims against a council, what compensation covers, and the time limits.

Who You Claim Against, and Under Which Law

A public liability claim in NSW is answered by whoever occupied, controlled or ran the place or activity where you were hurt: a shop, a pub, a rental landlord, an event organiser, or a local council responsible for a footpath or park. The claim itself is an ordinary negligence action, governed by the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW), the same Act that shapes negligence claims generally across the state. There is no separate "public liability Act." The term describes the type of claim, injury outside work and outside a motor vehicle accident, not a distinct statute.

Part 1A of the Civil Liability Act sets the general negligence framework that applies to a public liability claim just as it applies to any other negligence claim in NSW. Additional Parts of the same Act layer on top depending on who you are suing and how you were hurt: Part 5 for a claim against a public authority such as a council, Part 6 if intoxication is in play, and so on, each covered below.

The Occupier's Duty: Ordinary Negligence, Not a Codified Standard

Some Australian states have written a dedicated occupiers' liability provision into their civil liability statute. NSW has not. A full text search of the Civil Liability Act 2002 for the word "occupier" returns exactly one use, inside a recreational activity risk warning provision at section 5M(6), and there is no dedicated occupiers' liability Part or Division anywhere in the Act. A search of NSW's own legislation register for a standalone Occupiers Liability Act also returns nothing currently in force.

This matches the long standing legal position that the High Court's decision in Australian Safeway Stores Pty Ltd v Zaluzna folded occupiers' liability into ordinary negligence at common law, and NSW never re-codified it afterward. In practice, a shop, venue or landlord's duty to someone injured on the premises is assessed under the same general negligence principles in Part 1A, sections 5B to 5E, as any other public liability claim, calibrated to the circumstances, the nature of the premises, the foreseeability of the risk, rather than a separate statutory occupiers' duty.

What You Have to Prove

Section 5B sets the general test for negligence in NSW: a defendant is not negligent unless the risk of harm was foreseeable (known, or something they ought to have known about), the risk was not insignificant, and a reasonable person in the defendant's position would have taken the precaution, weighing up the probability of the harm, how serious it could be, the burden of taking precautions against it, and the social utility of the activity that created the risk. Section 5C adds that a safer alternative existing does not, on its own, prove negligence, and that a defendant fixing a hazard after the fact is not itself an admission they were negligent beforehand.

Causation is addressed separately, in sections 5D and 5E. A claimant must show the negligence was a necessary condition of the harm (factual causation) and that it is appropriate for the scope of the defendant's liability to extend to the harm caused. The onus of proving causation always sits with the claimant, not the defendant.

Obvious Risk, Recreational Activities and Risk Warnings

NSW's Part 1A has one of the more detailed sets of obvious risk and recreational activity defences of any Australian state, spread across sections 5F to 5N.

An "obvious risk" under section 5F is one that would have been obvious to a reasonable person in the injured person's position, including a risk that is not likely to occur and one that is not prominent or conspicuous. Section 5G presumes an injured person was aware of an obvious risk, though that presumption can be rebutted. Section 5H removes any proactive duty to warn of an obvious risk unless the injured person specifically asked about it, a law required the warning, or the defendant is a professional and the risk arises from the professional service itself. Section 5I removes liability altogether for the materialisation of an "inherent risk," one that cannot be avoided by reasonable care and skill, though it does not remove a claim based on a failure to warn.

A narrower, harder-edged set of provisions applies specifically to recreational activities, defined broadly under section 5K to include any sport, leisure pursuit, or activity carried on at a place people ordinarily use for recreation, such as a beach or a park, directly relevant to a public space injury claim. Section 5L bars liability entirely for harm from the obvious risks of a "dangerous recreational activity," one involving a significant risk of physical harm, regardless of whether the injured person actually knew about that risk. Section 5M removes the duty of care for a recreational activity where the defendant gave a risk warning, which does not need to be risk specific and does not need to be proven to have reached or been understood by the injured person, provided it was reasonably likely to reach people before the activity; that shield is lost if the warning was contradicted by something the defendant said, if the injured person was required to do the activity, or if the harm came from a breach of a specific safety law. Section 5N allows a recreational services contract to validly exclude the ordinary duty of care altogether, a state law counterpart to a similar recreational services carve-out under the Commonwealth's Competition and Consumer Act 2010.

Claims Against a Council: The Roads Protection

Part 5 of the Civil Liability Act, sections 40 to 46, gives public authorities, including local councils, the Crown, government departments and statutory authorities, protections not available to a private occupier. Section 42 asks a court to weigh an authority's actual resources and its full range of functions, not just the matter in the individual claim, and treats compliance with general procedures as evidence the authority exercised its functions properly. Section 44 removes liability for failing to exercise, or consider exercising, a licensing or regulatory function the authority could not have been compelled to exercise through the claimant's own proceedings.

The section that matters most to a footpath or road injury claim is section 45, the special non-feasance protection for roads authorities. A roads authority such as a council is not liable for harm caused by a failure to carry out road work, covering construction, installation, maintenance, inspection, repair or replacement, unless it had actual knowledge of the particular risk that caused the injury at the time. Mere actual knowledge does not, on its own, create a duty, and section 45 does not change whatever standard of care would otherwise apply once a duty exists. This is a genuinely narrow protection for a claimant to overcome: it requires actual knowledge, not a lower constructive knowledge standard of what the authority ought to have known. The ACT's equivalent protection, by contrast, extends to constructive knowledge, a real difference between the two jurisdictions worth knowing if your incident happened near the NSW/ACT border.

Intoxication and Illegal Conduct

Part 6 of the Act, sections 47 to 50, addresses intoxication. Section 50 is the key provision for a public liability claimant: if the injured person's capacity for reasonable care and skill was impaired by intoxication, a court must not award damages unless satisfied the injury would probably have happened anyway, even without the intoxication. If the court is satisfied of that, contributory negligence is presumed, and damages must be reduced by a minimum of 25%, or a greater percentage the court considers appropriate. That minimum does not apply if the court is satisfied the intoxication was not self-induced.

What Compensation Covers: The Threshold and the Current Maximum

Compensation for non-economic loss, the pain and suffering, loss of amenity and similar heads of damage, is only available once the injury reaches a minimum severity threshold. Under section 16, a court cannot award non-economic loss damages unless the severity of the injury is assessed at 15% or more of a most extreme case. Below that threshold, nothing is awarded for non-economic loss at all. Between 15% and 33% severity, a sliding table in section 16 compresses the share of the maximum amount actually awarded (15% severity converts to just 1% of the maximum, for example, and 25% severity converts to 6.5%); from 34% severity upward, the award tracks the same proportion of the maximum directly.

The maximum amount itself is indexed every year. Section 16 sets an original 2002 base figure of $350,000, but section 17 requires the Minister to declare a new maximum on or before 1 October each year, adjusted to the change in average weekly earnings, and that declared figure entirely supersedes the Act's own printed number. The current instrument, the Civil Liability (Non-economic Loss) Order 2010, sets the maximum non-economic loss award at $804,000, effective from 1 October 2025, a figure due to be superseded by a new order on or before 1 October 2026.

Contributory Negligence and Time Limits

A court can reduce a claimant's damages for their own contributory negligence, assessed under section 5R against the same objective, reasonable person standard used for the defendant. Under section 5S, that reduction can go as high as 100%, defeating the claim entirely, if the court considers that just and equitable in the circumstances.

For time limits, NSW's general personal injury limitation period, under the Limitation Act 1969, sections 50A to 50C, gives a claimant 3 years from the date the cause of action became discoverable, or 12 years from the act or omission that caused the injury, whichever expires first.

Pre Court Steps

Unlike some other Australian jurisdictions, NSW has no general pre-court notice-of-claim regime built into the Civil Liability Act itself. A review of every Part in the Act, covering Preliminary matters, Negligence, Child abuse, Personal injury damages, Offenders in custody, Mental harm, Proportionate liability, Public authorities, Intoxication, Self defence, Good samaritans, Food donors, Volunteers, Apologies, Birth of a child, and Damage by aircraft, turns up no equivalent to Queensland's separate Personal Injuries Proceedings Act or the ACT's in-Act notice regime. General civil procedure rules that apply to litigation broadly may still call for some pre litigation correspondence, but that sits outside the Civil Liability Act and is not a claim specific notice requirement.

The Insurance Reality

A public liability claim is answered, in practice, by the defendant's public liability insurer, though the claim itself is legally against the occupier, business or authority, not the insurer directly. NSW has nothing equivalent to the Nominal Defendant scheme that exists for compulsory third party motor accident insurance, which steps in when an at-fault driver cannot be identified or is uninsured. No fallback scheme of that kind was found for uninsured public liability defendants in NSW, a finding based on a reasonably thorough search rather than a source stating the negative outright, so an uninsured or under-insured small business is a real practical risk for a claimant to be aware of.

One genuine NSW compulsory insurance niche is strata common property. Owners corporations in NSW carry statutory insurance obligations for common property under the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, relevant if you were hurt in a stairwell, lobby or other shared area of an apartment building; see strata law in NSW for how that scheme works.

What This Claim Is Not

A public liability claim covers injury outside work and outside a motor vehicle accident. If you were hurt at work, that runs through NSW's workers compensation scheme instead; see workers compensation in NSW. If you were hurt in a motor vehicle accident, that runs through the CTP scheme; see motor accident compensation in NSW. If someone died as a result of the incident, see wrongful death claims in NSW for how a dependant's claim works.

A dispute with a neighbour that has not caused a personal injury is covered separately at neighbour disputes in Australia, and a dispute with a landlord over the state of a rental property, short of an injury claim, is covered at tenant rights in Australia. For the general rules on how long you have to bring any civil claim in Australia, see statute of limitations in Australia, and to check whether a matter has already been through the courts, see court records in NSW.