Your Builder Met the Code. Your Roof Still Has a Safety Problem

A new commercial building gets solar panels installed under NCC 2025. The builder follows the code, carves out a maintenance zone, completes the solar layout, and hands over the keys at practical completion. The building approval is in order. The certificate is issued. Everything looks right on paper.

Then a solar technician arrives to carry out the first maintenance inspection, walks out onto the roof, and finds no anchor points, no static lines, and no safe path to reach the panels. The builder did exactly what was required. The roof is still not safe to maintain.

This is the grey area at the centre of the NCC 2025 solar mandate, and building owners need to understand it before the first trade sets foot on their roof.

The National Construction Code 2025 requires commercial and mixed-use buildings to install solar photovoltaic systems covering one hundred percent of available roof area. To accommodate safe access, it allows areas designated for height safety systems or plant maintenance to be excluded from the solar layout. That is the extent of the construction obligation. The NCC does not require anchor points to be installed. It does not require a static lifeline system to be in place. It does not require any particular form of height safety infrastructure to be present at practical completion.

Solar panels are the newest addition to an already crowded roof. Commercial buildings carry HVAC equipment, exhaust fans, gutters, smoke exhaust systems, chimneys, and communications infrastructure, all of which need regular maintenance. Every visit to service any of them is a working-at-heights activity. The NCC has never required safe access infrastructure to be installed for any of it. The solar mandate simply brings more people to a roof where the access problem has always existed.

The obligation to provide safe maintenance access does not disappear because the builder has moved on. It transfers. Under the WHS Act, the person in control of a workplace holds a duty to provide and maintain a safe working environment so far as is reasonably practicable. That person may be the building owner, the facilities manager, or the strata committee. That duty covers every task on the roof: cleaning solar panels, servicing HVAC units, clearing gutters, testing smoke exhaust fans, inspecting chimneys, and everything else the building generates over its life. It is a permanent obligation, not a construction phase one.

There is a Section 22 duty under the WHS Act that requires designers of structures to account for safe maintenance access at the design stage. In practice, this is rarely enforced at building permit stage because the NCC does not trigger it. A development application can be approved, a building can be certified, and practical completion can be issued without anyone having verified that any trade can safely reach the equipment they need to service. The regulatory gap between the construction code and the work health and safety framework is real, and building owners are sitting in the middle of it.

At Anchored Height Safety, we see this gap widen every time a building changes hands. The developer met their code obligations. The builder delivered what was specified. The facilities manager inherits a roof full of equipment and no compliant way to access any of it. We know the WHS obligation does not become easier to meet once the panels are down and the HVAC is running.

Getting it right means filling the gap the NCC left. We assess the roof, design a height safety system that accounts for every piece of equipment requiring service, and install the anchor points, static lifelines, and fixed access routes that give your trades a safe, compliant path to do their work. We map the anchor layout for every access zone and specify the personal protective equipment required for each task, so the right gear is identified before anyone steps through the hatch. Our documentation tells every trade exactly what systems are in place, what each component is rated for, and when it was last certified.

When this is done properly, the building performs as it was designed to. Every system on the roof is maintainable. Tradespeople work safely and go home. The building owner has a documented compliance position under both the NCC and the WHS Act, and they are not relying on hope when WorkSafe comes to ask questions.

When it is not done properly, the liability sits with the building owner, not the builder. Systems underperform because maintenance cannot be carried out safely. A worker is injured attempting improvised access. WorkSafe investigators are not interested in what the NCC required at construction stage. They want to know what the person in control of the premises did to ensure safe access for ongoing maintenance. The builder left us a cleared zone is not an answer.

NCC 2025 has changed what goes on your roof. The WHS Act determines what that means for your obligations. The two do not fully overlap, and building owners are responsible for the gap between them.

If you are managing or acquiring a commercial building, do not wait for an incident to find out whether the access is compliant. Call us on 03 9555 3586, email sales@anchored.com.au or visit anchored.com.au to find out how we can assess your roof and put a height safety system in place that covers every system on it.