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New South Wales requires a contractor licence for residential building and trade work, including painting, once the job is worth more than a set threshold in labour and materials including GST. There is one notable exception: since 2015, stand-alone contracts for internal paintwork no longer need a licence unless the painting forms part of other home building work. So an interior repaint on its own may sit outside the licensing requirement while the same painter working on the exterior, or painting as part of a renovation, does not. Licensed painting work requires a recognised qualification such as a Certificate III in Painting and Decorating.

Queensland licenses the trade separately through the QBCC. Its painting and decorating class covers applying paint or other substances for protective, decorative or technical purposes including colour matching, applying texture coatings and wallpaper, and preparing surfaces for those materials, with one variant of the licence also covering cement render up to a limited thickness. A licensee may take on incidental work from other trade classes only up to a small value, and never work reserved for occupational licences such as plumbing, pest control or fire protection.

Other states and territories draw their own lines, so ask your state building regulator rather than assuming a rule you read about New South Wales applies where you live. Whoever you hire, ask for the licence number and check it on the regulator's public register before work starts.

Lead paint was used in most homes built in Australia before 1970, and it is a hazard before anyone picks up a sander. Paint that chips and flakes around windows and doors already sheds lead into dust and soil; removing old paint from walls multiplies that many times over. The safest outcome for sound lead paint is often to leave it alone or paint over it, and a good painter will discuss that option rather than defaulting to stripping everything back.

Where old paint does have to come off, the method is the whole safety question. Wet sanding and wet scraping are the safest ways to prepare a surface or remove lead paint, because they keep the dust down. Open-flame torches must not be used on lead paint at all, since they create lead fumes, and a heat gun should only be used on its lowest setting with an approved mask and without dwelling on one spot.

The protective measures are not optional extras. Anyone doing the work should wear an AS 1716-approved respirator fitted with P1 or P2 filters, plus coveralls; a paper dust mask is not adequate. Pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children need to be kept away from the work entirely. Clean-up uses an industrial or HEPA vacuum that is not also used for household cleaning, followed by wet-washing the area with a phosphate detergent and rinsing, with waste sealed in heavy-duty plastic and taken to an approved facility. If that sounds like more than a weekend job, that is the point: hiring a painter trained in safe lead work practices is the sensible call on an older home.

Asbestos is more common in Australian housing than most owners expect, and it is a bigger constraint on painting than lead. SafeWork NSW describes asbestos-containing materials as commonly used in flooring, kitchens and bathrooms as well as roofs, ceilings and walls in buildings constructed before the late 1980s, with bonded asbestos products in use from the 1940s to the late 1980s. That covers a very large share of the pre-1990 housing stock, including fibre-cement wall sheeting, eaves linings and some textured ceilings — all surfaces a painter might otherwise sand without a second thought.

The distinction that matters is between non-friable, or bonded, asbestos, where the fibres are held in a bonding compound, and friable asbestos, which can be crumbled to powder by hand pressure when dry. Both are dangerous once disturbed, but the rules differ.

Australian exterior painting seasons are the reverse of the northern hemisphere, and the constraint is heat rather than frost. In summer, December to February, the problem is surface temperature and direct sun: paint applied to a wall that has been baking all afternoon can skin over before it flows out, and the practical answer is to follow the shade around the house through the day and start early rather than to paint whatever elevation is convenient.

The mild shoulder seasons — autumn from March to May, and spring from September to November — are generally the most forgiving across the southern half of the country, with moderate temperatures and lower ultraviolet levels. Winter, June to August, is workable in much of Australia but brings shorter days, heavy dew on southern elevations in the morning and much slower drying, so a coat that would be touch-dry in an hour in February may hold a crew up for the afternoon.

In the tropical north the calendar is wet and dry rather than four seasons. Exterior work belongs in the dry season; painting through the wet means fighting both rainfall and humidity that stretches recoat times and encourages mould growth on fresh work.

The three things that age Australian exterior paint are sunlight, salt and moisture. North-facing and west-facing walls take the heaviest ultraviolet load and will always fade and chalk first, which is worth knowing before choosing a deep colour for exactly those elevations. Within a few kilometres of the coast, airborne salt settles on surfaces and accelerates corrosion of fixings and breakdown of the coating, and a periodic freshwater wash-down does more good there than any other maintenance.

In humid districts, mould and algae are the usual cause of a wall looking tired long before the coating has actually failed. Washing rather than repainting is often the correct fix. Check sealant joints, window and door junctions and any exposed end grain each year, because these fail first and let water behind the coating where it lifts paint from the substrate outwards.

Under Australian Consumer Law, services must be supplied with due care and skill, be fit for any purpose you made known, and be supplied within a reasonable time where no time was agreed. These guarantees apply automatically and a business cannot exclude them, whatever its terms say. For painting, the practical version is a written scope: which surfaces, how the preparation will be done, what primer and topcoat system, how many coats, and what happens about touch-ups.

On LokalMatch, you set out the painting job once — the rooms or elevations, the age and condition of the house, your postcode and when you want it done — and painters covering your area contact you themselves. Those businesses pay LokalMatch for the requests they take; homeowners do not pay to describe a job. LokalMatch does not paint anything, does not quote or set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that respond, so verifying licences and insurance is still on you.