Business Loans Victoria

Victoria's payment regime is the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002 (Vic). Like the other eastern states it runs on payment claims, payment schedules and adjudication — but Victoria is the odd one out in a way that matters. Its Act carries an excluded amounts regime: certain amounts, including some categories of variation, cannot be taken into account when calculating a progress payment claimed under the Act. In New South Wales or Queensland a disputed variation can generally be pursued through the fast adjudication process; in Victoria, if it falls into the excluded category, it cannot.

The practical consequence is that a Victorian contractor carrying a lot of variation work has a slower, less certain path to enforcing payment for it than an equivalent builder across the border. Reform to bring Victoria closer into line with the other states has been under discussion, and courts have narrowed some of the uncertainty, but the excluded-amounts distinction remains a real feature of the Victorian Act. Read the Act, and take advice on how it applies to your contracts, before relying on adjudication to recover a variation.

Victorian payroll tax is payable once Australian taxable wages exceed $1.0 million a year, at a base rate of 4.85%. Threshold rose to $1,000,000 on 1 July 2025; a mental-health surcharge applies only to very large employers. These are the 2025-26 figures from the State Revenue Office Victoria, verified 10 July 2026. Victoria's threshold is lower than New South Wales's, so a Melbourne employer typically becomes liable at a smaller wage bill than a Sydney one. Confirm the current figure before acting on it.

Victoria's excluded-amounts regime has a direct finance consequence that most builders never connect to it. If a meaningful slice of your revenue is variation work, and some of those variations cannot be fast-tracked through adjudication in Victoria the way they could in New South Wales, then that revenue is slower and less certain to collect. Financing on the assumption that variations will be paid promptly is riskier here than across the border.

The sensible response is a slightly larger working-capital buffer and finance structures that do not depend on variation income landing on time — asset finance that keeps plant off your cash position, and a working-capital facility sized to carry a longer variation tail. It is not a reason to hold back; it is a reason to size the buffer to the state you actually build in. Model it with your accountant against your real variation exposure.