Business Loans Queensland

Queensland's payment regime for construction work is the Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 (Qld) (the BIF Act). It follows the East Coast model: a person who carries out construction work can serve a payment claim, the respondent replies with a payment schedule, and a disputed claim can be referred to an adjudicator for a binding interim determination. The mechanism exists so that a subcontractor is not forced to fund a head contractor's cash-flow gap while a dispute drags on.

Queensland goes further than most states on retention and progress money. Under the Project Trust Account (PTA)framework in the BIF Act, money owed down the contracting chain is held on trust rather than in a head contractor's general account, which protects subcontractors if a contractor becomes insolvent. As at the date this page was reviewed, the framework applies to eligible Queensland Government contracts of $1 million or more, and to private sector, local government, statutory authority and government-owned corporation contracts of $10 million or more. The previously scheduled rollout to private projects below $10 million was paused under the Government's 2025 Building Reg Reno, so smaller private jobs are not currently caught. Check the BIF Act and the QBCC for the current position before you rely on it.

Queensland payroll tax is payable once your Australian taxable wages exceed $1.3 million a year. The rate is 4.75% (4.95% for wages above $6.5M). Regional employers may be entitled to a 1% discount on the rate. These figures are the 2025-26 settings published by the Queensland Revenue Office and were last verified on 10 July 2026. Thresholds and rates change annually, so confirm the current figure before acting on it.

Payroll tax matters to a finance decision because it is a fixed monthly outgoing that competes with loan repayments for the same working capital. A growing Queensland trades or logistics business that crosses the threshold mid-year can find its effective cost of labour steps up at exactly the point it is also servicing new equipment finance.

Here is the paragraph nobody else writes. If you hold a QBCC licence, the way you structure equipment finance changes more than your repayments. It changes the two numbers the QBCC uses to decide what you are allowed to earn.

Buy a machine on a chattel mortgage and the asset sits on your balance sheet as a tangible asset, while the loan sits there as a liability. The current portion of that loan, the repayments due in the next twelve months, is a current liability, and current liabilities are the denominator of the current ratio the MFR require to stay at or above 1:1. Finance a large asset carelessly and you can push that ratio below the line, which threatens the licence even if the business is trading well.

Take the same machine on an operating lease or rental and, depending on how it is treated, neither the asset nor the liability may land on the balance sheet in the same way, which leaves the current ratio undisturbed but also means you are building no net tangible asset base to support a higher revenue category. A chattel mortgage builds NTA over time as you pay the asset down; a rental does not.

So in Queensland, choosing between owning and renting your plant is a licensing question as much as a tax and cash-flow one. It can move a builder between MFR categories, and therefore between the amounts of work they are permitted to take on. The right structure depends on your balance sheet and your growth plans, and it is exactly the sort of thing to model with your accountant and, where required, in a QBCC MFR report before you sign. Avoir's role is to line up the finance options, chattel mortgage, lease or rental, so you and your accountant can choose with the licensing consequences in view.