Mandatory Committee Training Starts Now. The Bigger Story Is What Strata Hub Is Becoming.
Mandatory committee training has arrived. The course is the small part. Here’s the shift that matters.
On 1 October 2026, committee training stopped being a good idea and became a legal requirement in NSW. Anyone newly appointed or reappointed to a strata committee must now complete a free online course within three months of being elected, then refresh it each year as new modules are released. The course lives on Strata Hub, runs for about an hour, and ends with a certificate of completion. Miss the deadline and the consequence is automatic: you cease to be a committee member.
Not everyone is caught. The rule applies to new and returning members from 1 October onward, so anyone appointed before that date has nothing to do until they next stand. Fair Trading has also carved out a few exemptions for two-lot schemes, for licensed strata managing agents serving on a committee, for members of the Australian College of Strata Lawyers, and for casual vacancies filled for a period of less than three months. Everyone else is in, and the course is open to any owner who wants it, committee member or not.
Six ten-minute lessons cover what strata is, what a committee is and does, the realities of time and workload, legal and ethical duties, looking after your money and your building, and managing people and conflict lawfully. It will not turn a volunteer into an expert in an hour, and it was never meant to do so. I have argued before that training alone will not fix a dysfunctional committee, and I stand by that.
Read: Why Compulsory Training Won't Fix Your Committee — And What Actually Will
There are also concerns that another hurdle will put people off volunteering, something I have written about before in the context of owner apathy. The worry is reasonable because the more you ask of volunteers, the fewer tend to raise their hands. Fair Trading's Commissioner, Angus Abadee, reads it differently. In his view, apathy rarely comes from the work of making decisions in a group. It comes from the frustration of watching poor decisions create disputes that drag on for years. Reduce that friction, the argument goes, and stepping forward looks less daunting.
NSW has moved first, though not in isolation. The ACT ran its own inquiry into strata management this year, and its final report recommended training for executive committee members alongside a dedicated Strata Commissioner. The ACT Government declined to make that training compulsory, worried a mandate would deter already scarce volunteers, and favoured free or low-cost, voluntary modules instead. Same problem, two answers. Which approach produces better committees is the experiment now running in real time.
Whatever you make of that, the training is the small part of a much larger shift, and that is where the real interest lies. Strata Hub began life as a reporting tool. Abadee has been candid that the goal now is for it to become a management tool, and the groundwork is already visible. A document library is live, with template by-law notices, section 184 certificates, and proxy forms among other useful resources. There is a tool to build your own capital works fund plan, a facility to find a strata manager, and template emails to help secretaries chase certificates from the rest of the committee. The stated ambition behind it is cultural: to get strata to the point where harmony is the expected standard, not the exception. A deeper training module on repairs and maintenance is slated for 2027, with more to follow each year.
Read: Still Living in the 80s? Why Strata Management Needs an IT Upgrade More Than AI
There is a harder edge here too. Because the training runs through Strata Hub, the regulator's line of sight is widening. For a committee member, missing the deadline brings no knock on the door from Fair Trading; removal is automatic, by operation of law, and cannot be appealed. For managers and schemes, the same platform is closing the gaps: office-bearer changes must be filed within 28 days and annual reporting is compulsory, so obligations left undone now leave a visible trail. The room to quietly not comply is shrinking.
For committees, the practical response is simple enough. Treat this as a scheduling task rather than a compliance scramble. New and returning members should diarise the three-month deadline the day they are appointed, and secretaries should collect certificates as members finish and keep a simple record. Experienced members who are not yet caught can still sit the course, if only to see the material that their newer colleagues are working through. An hour spent now is a good deal cheaper than a lapsed member discovered after an important vote.
