PERTHShort-stay smoke alarm rules changed
WA amended its smoke alarm regulations for dwellings offered as short-term rental accommodation. What changed, who it applies to
If you own a place in Perth that goes on a short-stay platform for part of the year, the smoke alarm rules apply to you, and they were amended in 2024 specifically to say so.
Building and Energy's own guidance now states that compliant mains-powered alarms are required before transfer of ownership, sale, rent or hire, and that this includes homes made available for short-term rental accommodation. The amendment removed any argument about whether a few weekends a year counted as "hire". It does.
What that means in practice
The standard applies in full. Mains-powered, under ten years old, working, AS 3786:2014. The narrow battery exemption still exists for concrete ceilings and flat roofs with no cavity, and it is still narrow.
The penalty exposure is the part worth sitting up for. An owner offering a dwelling for hire without compliant alarms faces a fine of up to $5,000, which is a different order of magnitude to the $1,000 infringement that attaches to a home offered for sale.
The RCD requirement travels with it
Almost everyone who discovers the smoke alarm rule discovers the electrical one about a fortnight later, so here it is now.
A rental home must have two RCDs installed on the switchboard before it can be leased. Residual current devices — the trip switches that cut power when current leaks to earth. Two of them, covering the circuits. Tenants are advised to test them every three months, and a faulty one must be replaced immediately.
Both requirements exist for the same reason and both are the owner's problem, not the agent's and not the guest's.
If you are buying an investment property
Ask two questions before you sign, and ask them in this order.
Are there compliant hard-wired alarms, and are there two RCDs on the board? Neither is expensive to remedy. Both are conditions of putting the place to work, which means the day you settle is the day the clock starts.
This is one of the reasons we check both on every inspection and report them as compliance items rather than burying them in general observations. On an investment purchase they are not defects, exactly. They are the difference between a property you can let next week and one you cannot.
If you are already in the middle of a purchase and the clause is running, what a pre-purchase inspection covers sets out the scope, and pricing is published rather than quoted on request.
Why the 2024 amendment happened at all
The change did not come out of nowhere. For years the regulations were written around two clear categories: an owner-occupier selling a home, and a landlord leasing one on a residential tenancy. Short-stay accommodation sat awkwardly between them. A host letting a spare room or a whole house for a string of weekends was not selling, and was not entering a residential tenancy agreement in the ordinary sense, so a genuine question hung over whether the alarm rules bit at all. Some hosts assumed they did not, and furnished the place with the same battery alarms that had been on the ceiling for a decade.
The amendment closed that gap deliberately. By naming short-term rental accommodation explicitly, Building and Energy removed the interpretive wriggle room and put short-stay hosts on the same footing as any other owner offering a dwelling for hire. The policy logic is not hard to follow: a guest asleep in an unfamiliar house, who does not know where the exits are or which door sticks, is arguably more exposed in a fire than a long-term tenant who knows the place. The alarm that wakes them is doing exactly the job the regulations exist to guarantee, and it should not depend on how the booking was made.
What a compliant alarm actually has to be
It is worth being precise about what "compliant" means, because the word does a lot of quiet work. The alarm has to be mains-powered, wired into the home's electrical supply rather than running on a nine-volt battery someone is supposed to remember to change. It has to comply with AS 3786, the Australian Standard for smoke alarms, and it has to be under ten years old, because the sensing element inside a smoke alarm degrades over time and a fifteen-year-old unit may not trigger when it matters. An alarm that meets the standard on the day it was made but has sat on the ceiling since 2011 is not compliant, and an inspection will call it out.
Placement matters too. The alarms have to be positioned so that they will actually detect smoke on the path a sleeper would take to escape, which in practice means in or near the bedrooms and on each storey. A single alarm in the hallway of a two-storey house does not satisfy the intent, even if the unit itself is new and hard-wired. This is one of the areas where a quick self-assessment by an owner tends to miss the mark, because the instinct is to count alarms rather than to think about where the smoke and the sleepers actually are.
The gap between the rules and the reality on older homes
Most of the non-compliance we see on short-stay properties is not defiance, it is drift. A house bought fifteen years ago as a home, lived in, and then converted to short-stay when the owners moved or upgraded, tends to still have whatever alarms were fitted when they bought it. Nobody made a decision to be non-compliant; the house simply carried its old configuration into a new use that the old configuration was never checked against. The battery alarms that were legal for an owner-occupier in 2010 are the ones now sitting above a paying guest.
The fix is rarely expensive or complicated. An electrician hard-wires compliant alarms in the right positions, usually in a few hours, and the job is done for the best part of a decade. What makes it worth doing before you list rather than after is the penalty exposure and the simple fact that a fire in a short-stay property is exactly the scenario the regulator, the insurer, and any subsequent inquiry will scrutinise hardest. Getting an inspection to confirm the alarms and the RCDs before the first guest arrives turns an open-ended liability into a closed one.
Where this sits with your insurance
There is a further reason to treat the alarm and RCD requirements as non-negotiable rather than as box-ticking, and it has to do with what happens if something goes wrong. Short-stay accommodation is usually a commercial use of a residential property, and the insurance behind it, whether a specific short-stay policy or a landlord policy, will contain conditions. A claim following a fire in a property that did not meet the statutory alarm requirements is a claim an insurer has an obvious reason to examine closely. Compliance is not just about avoiding a fine from Building and Energy; it is part of keeping the cover you are relying on intact. The cheapest part of running a short-stay property is the part that keeps everyone in it safe, and it is the part least worth cutting.
A short checklist before you list
If you are about to put a Perth property on a short-stay platform, or you have one listed and have never had the safety items confirmed, three checks cover most of the risk. Confirm that every smoke alarm is mains-powered, under ten years old, and compliant with AS 3786, and that they are positioned near the bedrooms and on each storey rather than clustered in a hallway. Confirm that there are two RCDs on the switchboard covering the circuits, and that they trip when tested. And confirm that nothing about the way the house is now being used, extra bedding in a converted study, a sofa bed in a room with no alarm nearby, has quietly created a sleeping space that the existing alarm coverage does not reach. The first two are statutory. The third is judgement, and it is the one an experienced eye adds to a checklist.
Common questions
Do short-stay properties need compliant smoke alarms in WA?
Yes. Compliant mains-powered alarms are required before transfer of ownership, sale, rent or hire, and this includes homes made available for short-term rental accommodation.
How many RCDs does a rental need in WA?
Two residual current devices installed on the switchboard before the home can be leased.
This comes up on every pre-purchase building inspection and building investigation & diagnostics we carry out.
Read next: selling a house in WA? Your battery smoke alarms probably aren't legal and do your smoke alarms have to be interconnected in WA?.
Sources
Read rather than recalled. Summarised here; the documents themselves are Crown copyright and are linked rather than reproduced.