Can You Remove Asbestos Yourself in Victoria?

The legal limit, exactly

Under the Victorian Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017, an unlicensed person can remove asbestos without a licence only if all of these are true:

• It’s non-friable (bonded) asbestos — solid material like fibro cement sheeting, not crumbly or powdery.
• The total area is 10 square metres or less.
• The total removal time is under one hour in any seven-day period — and if more than one person is working, that’s the combined time of everyone.

Miss any one of those three and you legally need a licensed removalist. There is no unlicensed exception for friable asbestos — the crumbly kind — of any size, ever.

Why 10 square metres is smaller than it sounds

Ten square metres feels like a lot until you measure a real job. A standard 1.8-metre-high fence covers 1.8m² for every metre of length — so 10m² is only about 5.5 metres of fence. A single bathroom’s wall sheeting can hit the limit on its own. A shed or a garage is many times over it. A roof is 100–200m².

So in practice, the DIY allowance covers genuinely small things — a single sheet, a small section of eave, one panel. Almost every job people actually want done — a full fence line, a roof, a shed, re-cladding a wall — is well past the limit and legally requires a licensed removalist.

The one-hour rule catches people out too

Even under 10m², there’s the time limit: under one hour of removal work across a whole seven-day period. You can’t get around the area limit by chipping away at a big job an hour at a time either — the area cap still applies. Both conditions have to be met at once. It’s designed to keep genuine DIY to small, quick, one-off tasks, not whole-of-house projects done slowly.

Even when it’s legal, you still have to do it properly

Being allowed to remove a small amount doesn’t mean you can just rip it off and bin it. Asbestos Victoria strongly recommends using a licensed removalist even for small jobs — but if you do remove a small amount yourself, you must follow strict safety steps:

• PPE — a P2 respirator, disposable coveralls and gloves. Asbestos fibres are invisible and odourless, so you can’t tell when you’re being exposed.
• Wet methods — keep the material damp to stop fibres going airborne. No dry cutting, sanding or sweeping.
• No power tools, brooms or high-pressure water — these are exactly what send fibres into the air.
• Remove sheets intact — don’t break or smash them.
• Double-wrap and seal the waste in heavy-duty plastic, clearly labelled as asbestos.
• Legal disposal only — to an EPA-approved facility (more on that below).

You cannot put asbestos in the bin

This is where DIY most often goes wrong. Asbestos waste cannot go in your household rubbish or council collection — it’s illegal under Victoria’s Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008, and the EPA treats dumping asbestos as a serious offence with real penalties. It must be double-wrapped, labelled, and taken to an EPA-approved facility that accepts asbestos. Not every tip does. Our guide to asbestos disposal in Melbourne covers which sites take it and what the packaging rules are.

Why DIY usually isn’t the saving it looks like

The appeal of DIY is saving the removalist’s fee. But the real maths rarely favours it:

Most jobs aren’t legal to DIY  over 10m² or over an hour, and you’re breaking the law by doing it yourself.

• You still pay for PPE and disposal — proper respirators, coveralls, wrapping, and EPA-facility fees add up.
• One mistake creates a bigger problem — snapping a fibro sheet instead of removing it intact turns cheap bonded asbestos into a friable hazard that costs multiples more to fix, and contaminates the area.
• The exposure risk is yours, your family’s and your neighbours’ — asbestos disease has no safe exposure threshold, and a shared fence job puts the people next door at risk too.
• Getting caught doing illegal removal carries penalties — WorkSafe prosecutes unlicensed removal, and there are documented cases of exactly that.

For anything beyond a genuinely tiny, intact, easily-accessed piece, a licensed removalist is usually both the legal path and — once you count PPE, disposal, risk and the cost of a mistake — the cheaper one.

When you must use a licensed removalist

To be clear, you legally need a licensed removalist whenever:

• The non-friable asbestos is more than 10 square metres, or
• The job takes more than one hour in a seven-day period, or
• Any friable asbestos is involved (Class A licence required), or
• The material is damaged, weathered or fire-affected such that it may be friable.

Jobs over 10m² also require WorkSafe Victoria to be notified at least 5 days before work starts, plus a removal control plan — obligations a licensed removalist handles as part of the job.

The honest recommendation

For a genuinely tiny, intact, bonded piece — a single small sheet you can remove in minutes — the law allows DIY, and if you follow every safety step properly, it’s your call. For everything else, which is most real jobs, use a licensed removalist. It’s not just the safe option; for the majority of household asbestos work it’s the legal one, and once you account for the risk and the cost of getting it wrong, it’s usually the sensible one too.

Not sure if your job is over the line?

If you’re not certain whether your job is under the 10m² limit, or whether your material is friable — don’t guess, and don’t start cutting. We remove asbestos across Dandenong and Melbourne’s south-east, and we’ll tell you honestly whether your job legally needs a licensed removalist or whether it’s genuinely something you can handle. Send us a photo or book a free assessment.