Your eligibility is a grade.
Here’s how it’s marked.

The Home Building Compensation Fund (HBCF) is administered by icare on behalf of the NSW Self Insurance Corporation. For residential building work over $20,000 including GST, a builder must hold a Certificate of Insurance (COI) for the specific job, purchased before starting work and before taking any money, including the deposit. Starting work without cover is an offence under the Home Building Act, not a paperwork slip.

But you cannot simply buy a COI. First, icare assesses your business and issues a Certificate of Eligibility (COE). The COE is your standing approval to purchase certificates, and it records two things that shape your whole pipeline: your permitted Open Job Limits, and the maximum contract price you can take on per construction type. Eligibility and insurance are different documents doing different jobs, and one cannot stand in for the other.

How the assessment actually runs

Under the current eligibility manual, around 90 per cent of builders are assessed by Automated Scorecard Review (ASR). The scorecard uses an eligibility score drawn from a commercial credit bureau, and typically returns an outcome within two business days. A low score, or an identified adverse risk, tips the application into a manual financial assessment instead, which is slower and goes deeper into the accounts.

Two numbers dominate the outcome:

• The eligibility score. Each Open Job Value band requires a minimum score. Under the manual’s current tables, a new builder maxes out at $1.5 million of open work at a score of 523, $3 million requires 686, and the top of the scale, $12 million, requires 839. Builders are graded into tiers: Tier 1 runs from $1.5 million to $3 million of open value, Tier 2 from $3.5 million to $8 million, and Tier 3 from $8.5 million to $12 million.
• ANTA (Adjusted Net Tangible Assets). icare’s measure of your real financial buffer: the fire-sale value of the business’s assets less third-party liabilities. It exists to answer one question, can this business absorb a normal disruption (a payment dispute, weather, a shutdown, a cost variance) without falling over. ANTA is assessed against your assumed turnover, derived by treating your open job limit as if it were fully used across a year. The manual’s worked example puts $300,000 of ANTA against $10 million of assumed turnover, a ratio of 3 per cent.

Eligibility is not a set-and-forget approval

The manual is explicit that eligibility is not a standing entitlement and not a contract of insurance. icare can revise, suspend or cancel it at any time, and runs several kinds of review: new-builder reviews, programmed reviews on a cycle, special reviews where something has changed or gone wrong, and Builder Profile Change reviews where you ask for different limits. That last one matters, because it is the formal path upward: if you want a higher Open Job Value, you can apply for a profile change and demonstrate the ANTA to support it.

A note on currency: the specifics above, the $20,000 COI threshold, the tier bands, the score thresholds and the ASR process, are drawn from version 12 of the icare eligibility manual (March 2026). These settings change between versions, so confirm the current manual before relying on any figure. And none of this is financial advice; how your business should structure its balance sheet is a conversation for your accountant.

Nothing in a software platform changes the rules of the scheme. What it changes is the quality of the inputs the scheme reads. The eligibility assessment is, in the end, an outsider reading your paperwork: your financial statements, your job values, your history. Builders who run current books and know their numbers walk into that reading in a materially different position to builders whose accounts are reconstructed at year end.

In practice that means three habits. Costs captured as they happen, so job cost tracking and the P&L agree with reality all year. A WIP position that is measured rather than guessed, so reported profit is not a timing illusion. And a live view of contract values across every open job, so the open job limit is a managed constraint instead of a surprise. None of that requires software, but software is how busy builders make it automatic rather than aspirational.