What is the LBP register and how do I use it?

Go to lbp.govt.nz and use the public register search. Enter the person's full name as it appears on their quote or contract. If you only have a company name, ask who the LBP on the job will be, because the licence belongs to a person and never to a business.

Common names return several results. Match on the region and the licence classes before you assume you have the right person. If you are unsure, ask the builder for their licence number and search that instead, which returns exactly one result.

Licensed means the person may carry out or supervise Restricted Building Work in the classes shown, as at the date you look.

Suspended means the licence is on hold. A suspended LBP cannot carry out Restricted Building Work while the suspension stands.

Cancelled, or no result at all, means the person does not hold a licence. They may still be a capable builder for work that is not restricted, but they cannot do or sign off Restricted Building Work.

Check the expiry date as well as the status. Licences are renewed on a cycle, and an expired licence is not a current licence.

A licence is not general. It is held in classes, and each class covers particular work. Someone licensed for Carpentry is not thereby licensed for Design.

Restricted Building Work is the work that keeps a house standing up and keeps the weather out: the primary structure and the external moisture envelope of a home, plus the design of them. It is the reason the licence scheme exists.

For work that needs a building consent on a house, the Restricted Building Work must be carried out or supervised by an LBP, and each LBP involved must give you and the council a Record of Work when their part is finished. If nobody can produce a Record of Work at the end, the council can decline the code compliance certificate, and that becomes your problem, not the builder's.

When the Building Practitioners Board decides a complaint against an LBP, the decision is published, and the register shows it. The published decision states the breach and the penalty, which can be a fine, a training requirement, a suspension or cancellation.

Complaints that are still being investigated are not published, so a clean register entry means no published decision, not necessarily no history. Read any decision that does appear rather than counting them: some concern paperwork, others concern the building work itself, and the decision says which.

That is not automatically a problem. Plenty of good tradespeople are not LBPs because they do not do Restricted Building Work: painters, landscapers, most renovation work that does not touch the structure or the weathertightness.

It only becomes a problem if the job DOES involve Restricted Building Work and nobody on the job holds the licence for it. In that case, ask directly who the LBP will be and search that person. A builder who cannot name their LBP for consented structural work is telling you something.

The LBP register is about a person's licence. It is silent on the company that will actually take your deposit and invoice you, and those are often different things: the licence sits with the individual, while the contract sits with a limited company.

So the register cannot tell you whether the company is currently registered, how long it has traded, whether it has been through a liquidation, or whether the people behind it have been involved in other companies that failed. Those facts sit on the Companies Register and in the New Zealand Gazette, and they are the ones that decide whether your deposit is safe.

The two checks answer different questions and you want both: the LBP register tells you the person is allowed to do the work, and the company record tells you who you are actually contracting with.